A Niverville artist has recently had a new piece installed in the village centre plaza of Sage Creek. Darren Sakwi’s sculpture, “Sky Spirit,” was installed on October 15 in the plaza off Highway 59 in southern Winnipeg.
The piece is made entirely of stainless steel, and its rippled form was inspired by the northern lights. At 26 feet long, the large sculpture had to be welded together and assembled using cranes.
Sakwi is the owner/operator of Stainless Concepts, a design and fabrication business in Winnipeg, but he enjoys creating sculptures out of metal in his spare time. When he heard that Qualico in Sage Creek was looking for artist proposals for a sculpture, he jumped on the opportunity.
“There were some ideas they wanted incorporated into the proposed piece,” Sakwi recalls. “Aurora Borealis was one suggestion that immediately sparked my imagination. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do to represent it, but I knew if I could pull it off it would be jaw-dropping.”
The artist began by sketching ideas out on paper, and then produced a one-sixteenth model out of construction paper to conceive of how the final piece would be put together. Once he was informed that his was the winning proposal, he moved on to the build phase.
“The size of the sculpture was definitely one of the hurdles,” Sakwi says. His company didn’t have enough workspace at that time, so he had to find another space to use. “Luckily my good friend Leon at Fusion Industries here in [Niverville] was nice enough to let me use some of his space to do the final assembly. This helped me out tremendously with the use of his overhead cranes.”
While stainless steel may be a practical choice for an outdoor sculpture in Manitoba, Sakwi says it is also an aesthetic choice.
“What I enjoy about stainless steel is how clean and seamless it is as a final product. It allows for a variety of different finishes, giving it different looks and features. In this case, it’s almost like two different sculptures,” he says. “[There’s] the daylight sculpture that shows its raw structure, allowing for in-depth examination of all the curves and attention to detail. And then there is the night-time sculpture that transforms into dancing lights along the now-clearer grain pattern.”
Sky Spirit is not Sakwi’s first sculpture and it certainly won’t be his last. He’s planning to create more pieces, with a goal of one day holding a show of his work. He can also foresee one day having one of pieces displayed in town.
“If Niverville was interested, I would be up for that,” he says. “One of the challenges is winning over people to accept art. It has a cost, and based on that not everyone likes art, unfortunately.”
Whether or not everyone sees value in what he creates, Sakwi says the artistic process is something he finds immensely rewarding.
“To envision something from nothing and make it come to life is a great feeling.”
