Art of education: rising tide display
Marin County sculpture illustrates dangers of climate change
As a king tide crept up on Mill Valley on Sunday morning, Jeff Downing stood knee deep in Richardson Bay, holding an 8foot striped pitchfork and looking like American Gothic in the mud.
Downing was installing an environmental sculpture to warn that the highwater mark brought twice a year by king tides will soon be the daily highwater mark if society does not get serious about climate change. And if you want to grab the attention of speeding cyclists and power walkers along the paved path connecting Sausalito to Mill Valley, it might just take a set of 250pound pylons sunk into the marsh and topped by nautical symbols.
“They are striped to be highly visible, like lighthouses seen from the sea,” Downing told The Chronicle. He spent two hours transporting the heavy ceramic sections out into the steadily rising bay, first in rubber boots and then in chest waders.
The installation, titled “Aqua Metric Markers,” lasted four hours with installation and deinstallation, and all the effort that went into constructing and tearing it down was part of the performance, Downing said. “I want people to notice me out in the water, doing the work to set it up.” A sandwich board Downing perched alongside the path advertised his larger museum exhibition, “Level Up! A Sculptural View of Sea Level Rise.”
Downing, 58, a tenured professor of ceramic art at San Francisco State University, is the 2020 artist in residence at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art. A year’s work is a lot of sacrifice for an
unannounced exhibition that only lasts a morning, so he’ll dry his metric markers off and install them at the museum in Novato. The exhibition, which will feature four of the markers and his still photographs of the sculpture in the water, opens Saturday and will be up through Dec. 24.
Downing spent nearly a year doing field studies to test locations before arriving at this spot beneath the Richardson Bay bridge on Highway 101.
“If you walk down this path every week, you’ll know about rising sea level,” said Jon Gornstein, who has lived in Sausalito since 1988. He was intent on getting his 10,000 steps for the day, but on this morning, he stopped on a bench near a water fountain to try and figure out what Downing was doing out there splashing around with a wagon.
“It’s a scientific project, right?” Gornstein asked. “He’s measuring the effect of the tides.”
Once his installation was complete, Downing was happy to stand around and answer any and all questions. That is part of his mission as an educator.
“There are people who don’t think about sea level rise and don’t know the extreme of it,” he said, while loading parts from his truck into the wagon. “In 20 years, the sea level will be 6 inches higher, which means inundation and flooding streets. In 2045, there will be 4,000 homes under water.”
Downing has given it more thought than most because he lived for 10 years in Santa Venetia, an area of San Rafael that is near sea level. First he was required to buy flood insurance for his mortgage. Then he was required to pay into a bond to replace pumps along the levees. Then he sold the house and moved to the higher ground of Marinwood, on the east side of the freeway.
The idea to turn climate change into art crystallized for him in 2017 when he was on a residency to study land art in Morelia, Mexico. His project was to gauge the effect of the drought, which caused a lake for swimming on public land to become a lake for wading.
When he returned to San Rafael, he turned that concept around. “I decided to make something the opposite, not about water going down but about water going up,” he said. “My objective is to raise awareness about sea level rise in coastal communities.”
With the sculptures still only halfway out of the water Sunday, Downing already had raised the awareness for Carrie and Lee Marshall of Sausalito, out on their morning walk.
“The juxtaposition of the beauty of the piece and the danger of sea level rise is striking,” Carrie said. By the time they’d walked to the Mill Valley end of the path and back, they expected the sculpture to be complete. They also expected the king tide to have risen to the point where the water covered the path and they’d be sloshing along in their walking shoes.
“This path is a reminder of sea level rise,” Lee said. “Marin is not immune to climate change, and it is only going to get worse.”
It is Downing’s intent that “Aqua Metric Markers” will raise public awareness more quickly than the rising sea level.
“The markers at king tide give a glimpse of what high tide will look like in the future,” Downing said, “and the king tides of the future could flood the low lying neighborhoods of Mill Valley.”