Marina Seidl is making an ocean-themed art installation in an alcove in the Plaza Building for her senior project, hoping to create a hangout space for students in future years. She wants it to be an immersive aquarium experience.
“[I wanted to create a] really vibrant ocean scene,” Seidl said. “It’s not supposed to look super realistic or super cartoonish; something in the middle. I want it to be surrounding you.”
There will be a coral reef painted over the doorway, and a shark or dolphin on the wall. To help add to the ambience of the room, the lights will be covered in teal tubes, which will reflect patterns on the walls. Seidl will also be hanging tissue paper and strands of lights in the shape of jellyfish from the ceiling.
“I love painting fish and it’d be so cool to do an ocean scene or an aquarium,” Seidl said.
Since Seidl has taken many visual art classes at Northwest Academy, she knew she wanted to do something related to painting for her senior project. She wants her art to have a lasting impact on the community.
“Hopefully more students will be encouraged to do public art projects for their senior projects in the future,” said Veronica Derner, a senior.
Northwest Academy’s art-focused structure has helped Seidl develop her interest in visual art, and she hopes that this mural will be an exciting way to continue creating.
“I never really considered myself an artist before coming here for high school,” Seidl said. “I would take a drawing class or something, but I never was like, ‘Oh, like, I love doing art’ until I started painting.”
The art installation is meant to be a permanent fixture. Seidl wants there to be creative work everywhere, especially because there are so many white walls in Plaza.
“It’s always exciting to have art be accessible to a larger audience,” Joanne Kim, Head of High School, said. “Art functions in a lot of different ways in our community, [and] it’s hard to say what that function ought to be.”
In addition to their projects, Northwest Academy seniors also write a research paper. For hers, Seidl is considering exploring the importance of being around the arts, and how public projects like this affect the community.
“Marina stumbled upon some interesting ideas and threads for research,” Julie Ellington, who teaches the Senior Research Thesis class, said. “Just around ideas of what community art actually does for us, the ways that it impacts our well-being in a space, how it connects us to other artists that we might never meet or aren’t in a community with directly and how we can remain in community with artists through their work.”
On top of an exploration of public art, Seidl also wants ocean conservation to be part of her project.
“I want to go into biology, and this [could] be the perfect [way to] dive into that,” Seidl said. “So I was like, this could be some kind of ocean conservation piece. But then I [realized] I don’t know how to blend talking about [how] important art is with protecting the oceans.”
Seidl values art exhibitions along with biology, and wants to turn her capstone presentation into a student gallery.
“[Public art] is just [a] really valuable part of a city, especially street murals like the ones we did here,” Seidl said. “I thought that was really great, and I wish we could do another one. I want to write about that, and the impacts of art as a public medium, not just something you do for yourself.”
