A Project of the Tucson Pima Arts Council

The Lumanillo
by Rae Douglass
Sponsor: Tucson's Newspapers
Nonprofit: Community Food Bank

An ocotillo transformed into a shimmering apparition to be as vivid in the day as the night. Posing in the desert landscape its form looks at once familiar, but energized with the power of light, it becomes a cheerful and welcoming accent. My proposal takes the traditional desert form of the Ocotillo made out of steel rods that are partially coated with a diffraction film. The film is patterned on the rods to abstract the same pattern of thorn and leaf on the ocotillo branch. The rods are also bent at various spots like its desert cousin. The film is oriented to produce a color effect that I discovered a few years ago that appears to emanate from the solid center of the steel rod. The display in direct sunlight is very vibrant, and gives an elegant color distribution along the length of the rod. At night the branches will glow from a concealed spotlight at the base. I have included a 6' sample of one of these arms. Please take it outside on a sunny day, stick it into the ground, and view it from the same side as the sun. You will notice that the colors change as you move around the branch. The rods will fan out from the base in the traditional form, and will be secured to a base buried in the ground, or to the fiberglass boulder provided by TPAC and Tucson Electric. The light source will be recessed in the base and shine upwards to illuminate the arms of the Lumanillo.

The sculpture is completely weatherproof, and will be as visible and vibrant in the day as the night. The sculpture is 12' tall and last year worked well with the monumental scale of the Omni Tucson National Resort, but since it will be solar powered this year, it is advisable that the site be quite dark at night, and have little or no ambient light that could compete with the solar light source.

One of the major assets of Tucson is the unusual beauty of the region, the flora and fauna coupled with the clear and abundant light and its interplay with the desert. The luminaria is a tradition not unique to Tucson , so it is vital that it be made out of a form unique to our environment to create an experience that visitors will remember us by.