Just southeast of Nashville, Tenn., Mill Ridge Park is a 600-acre nature preserve located in Antioch. Designed to promote healthy living and build community in a diverse town of more than 90,000, the park includes paths, open spaces and features that invite people to play. It’s a busy spot with lots of local support and a full calendar of activities, ranging from concerts and festivals to yoga classes and movies on the lawn.
Anchored by a large playground and multiple event spaces, the park is perfect for performances. Visitors can also enjoy fitness equipment, a trail loop, courts and picnic shelters. The park also features restrooms and ample parking.
With a goal to unite people, park designers wanted a great lawn with capacity for a thousand, huge play spaces and an interactive public art display.
The Metro Arts Commission spearheaded the art display project, and chose Daily tous les jours, an award-winning art and design studio based in Montreal, to create it.
Creating a large-scale piece of interactive, durable art that could be permanently outdoors was a challenge that demanded artistry and careful planning. Each component had to be sturdy enough to weather four seasons, from freezing temperatures and inches of snow to glaring, 90-degree summer sun. To support their vision, the artists had to find a material that could withstand foot traffic from thousands of visitors over many years. They found just the material they were looking for in Spectra nosings offered by Wooster Products.
Daily tous les jours collaborated with local artists and residents to create something unique for each visitor. Short, vertical posts called bollards hold speakers and other technology, and are surrounded by strips embedded in the walkway. There are five bollards along the path, each surrounded by strips that trigger sound, rhythm and lights. Sound and rhythm recordings were provided by the Rhythmic Ravens band from Cane Ridge High School, located across the street from the park.
"We worked with the students from the marching band to develop these sounds,” explained Justine Jacob-Roy, operations manager at Daily tous les jours. “They recorded them, and we integrated them into the artwork. It's important for us to have this engagement with the local community.”
Cane Ridge High School students use the command “Whistle, Two, Ready!” to cue their music, and they inspired the artwork’s title. The colorful strips in the concrete are the stair nosings provided by Wooster Products. Spaced apart like the lines for a marching band and leading foot traffic into the area, the strips circle each bollard to form an interactive path. Multiple people step on the strips to cue sounds, rhythms and lights that blend to form something new, using the energy from everyone to create a masterpiece. Park organizers hope the installation will bring people together through music with no language required.
This ambitious outdoor art project aimed to do something completely new. “It was a first for us,” said Mathieu Frenette, technical director for Daily tous les jours, as he explained the materials selection process. The project required 62 strips in six different lengths, so flexible length options were important, and material that would stand up to time, wear and the elements was essential.
The artists chose to use stair nosings from Wooster because of “the presence, the fact that they are pretty wide, and we had confidence in them being used a lot – they maintain their look over time outside,” Frenette explained.
Since this type of project had never been done before, Frenette and the team made a full-size mockup of one 10-by-10 concrete slab with embedded strips.
Mill Ridge Park is much more than a green space: it is an inviting escape from the everyday. Many organizations worked together to create it, including Metro Arts, The Friends of Mill Ridge Park, Daily tous les jours, The Cane Ridge High School marching band and numerous community leaders. The “Whistle, Two, Ready!” public artwork celebrates the co-existence between nature and urban growth, and it will promote unity through shared experience for years to come.
For More Information:
Mill Ridge Park: www.friendsofmillridgepark.org
Daily tous les jours: www.dailytouslesjours.com/en
Wooster Products: www.woosterproducts.com