(Photo and copyright by Gayle Marechal)
May 12, 2010
By Claire Sykes
Nearly 3,000 years ago, someone in China discovered that by inserting tiny needles into specific areas of the body, one’s health could be restored—and acupuncture has been working ever since. Now, Portland artist and friend of mine, Adam Kuby is using it to help heal the city with something he calls the Portland Acupuncture Project.
Adam Kuby (Photo and copyright by Claire Sykes)
Acupuncture is an aspect of traditional Chinese medicine, which embraces humans and animals as harmonious living beings that have a constantly changing flow of energy. Called qi (“chee”), this energy travels through the body’s 14 primary channels, or meridians, each corresponding to a different organ. Injury, illness and aging can cause stagnation or blockage of qi. With the insertion of fine needles into selected points along the meridians, acupuncture releases stagnated qi to obtain balance of energy and improve overall health.
(Courtesy www.alltogetherhealth.com)
Viewing the city as a living body (!), Adam is identifying places in the urban landscape that represent some of Portland’s most challenging problems, valuable assets and greatest potential. The six-month public art installation that he brainstormed in 2006 will coincide with a series of 2010 public workshops to help steer the Portland Plan, a guide for the city’s growth over the next 25 years.
On Saturday, April 24th, my friend Sandy and I joined about a dozen others up in Mt. Tabor Park to welcome and help install the third of the first three 35-foot-tall needles—built with help from the brains and calloused hands of Jim Schmidt and Ken MacKintosh, of Art & Design Works, in North Plains, Oregon—that Adam and everyone inserted that day.
Adam’s other two needles are sticking up at Portland’s Waterfront Park near the Hawthorne Bridge and at Kelley Point Park at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. He chose the points for their proximity to water, along what he identified as the city’s “lung meridian.” The needles will remain inserted here for six to eight weeks, then moved to new sites in town three more times.
That day, on the east side of Mt. Tabor Park’s upper reservoir with its view of downtown, the partly cloudy sky hinted at rain while a cool breeze made me wish I’d worn a hat. The several of us there, including a KOIN-TV cameraman, entertained our anticipation with small talk, then right on time at 3:00 a red truck arrived, pulling a trailer with the needle. There in the back, in two pieces side by side, lay the high-tensile-steel, pole-like construction wrapped in silver tape (an economical solution to achieve a metallic sheen); and its copper-colored Spandex tip tied in puffy sections like a shiny caterpillar.
(Photo and copyright by Claire Sykes)
(Photo and copyright by Claire Sykes)
Adam, Jim and Ken lifted them off the truck and set them down on the ground, then joined the two parts of the needle together. A guy with long gray hair who called himself Ti stabbed a shovel into the gravel acupoint and began digging. Here, a five-foot-deep foundation topped with a steel-bolted base would stabilize the needle, built to meet safety codes and withstand up to 80-mph winds.
(Photo and copyright by Claire Sykes)
The needle lay in the grass pointing southwest, with a shorter length of heavy steel jutting up at one end aimed to work as leverage. We held the silvery cylinder with the pillowy tip up a couple of feet off the ground, admiring and commenting on its artful fabrication and engineering brilliance while we waited for our next instruction. Then a few of the guys pushed down on the steel leverage, while the rest of us hoisted the needle up, Iwo Jima-style.
(Photo copyright by Claire Sykes)
(Photo and copyright by Gayle Marechal)
Jim and Ken brought hard hats that we all got to wear, as we heave-hoed on ropes to pull the needle upright, high into the air. Adam got up there and adjusted the fabric, then they bolted the whole thing down good and pounded in a small metal interpretive sign.
(Photo copyright by Adam Kuby)
(Photo copyright by Adam Kuby)
The sculpture towered into the sky, our gazes following it upward. What started out as some crazy idea of Adam’s had finally become real, and here it was before us. By now, more people had collected. We stood in a congregation before the artist, who was dwarfed by his creation behind him, while he briefly explained the Acupuncture Project. Then he introduced Floy Jones of Friends of the Reservoirs. She talked about Mt. Hood snows that melt and cascade down into the Bull Run Watershed, the water flowing under the earth and filling the park’s three reservoirs, one of them shimmering behind her. She stressed the importance of safe and abundant water in our community, and urged each of us to conserve it and keep it clean.
(Courtesy www.preservationnation.org)
What happened next was something I had really hoped Adam would do. And it could’ve come off as corny, but we kept it playful, yet serious enough. He had us all gather around the needle, press our hands to it and breathe deeply—and I thought about acupuncture needles at work, everywhere. Then, surprisingly, he asked us to shout out a collective “Open Water!”—the name he gave to this acupoint. (Each of his needles in the city has a different name, capturing their location’s issue and intention.) As I took in the late-afternoon air, I looked at those hands, most of us strangers all huddled close together, and for the first time that day outside I felt warm.
A few days later, I walked to the park by myself to go look at the needle. It was fun to come upon it, pretending I was seeing it for the first time. It swayed ever so slightly in the early-evening breeze, sunlight glinting off its copper tip, and I stood there and imagined that the earth at my feet was my own skin.
It’s fitting, for me, that Adam chose Mt. Tabor Park as the place for one of his project’s acupoints. Since I moved into the neighborhood two years ago, I go to the park often. In those woods I have yakked with friends and talked to myself, marveled at an anthill and reveled in the view of Mt. Hood, got “lost” on the trails and swung on the swings, trudged through knee-deep snow at midnight on the winter solstice and sat on a bench at sunset in the rain. The place has been my diversion and my discovery, my confidante and my comfort, my meditation and my celebration.
(Courtesy www.portlandground.com)
In a few weeks, Adam’s huge needle will be removed (and I’ll be there to help). Once it’s gone, months or years later, even if you’d never heard of the Portland Acupuncture Project, you might know that something happened there. That someone did something no one else had done before, and that people were changed by it—just by looking at it. And I bet if you stand there on the hill east of the upper reservoir, you’ll feel it. The qi. Like the water that rushes off the mountain and runs into the city, it’ll be flowing.
For more about the Portland Acupuncture Project, see www.acuportland.org and for Adam Kuby, www.adamkuby.com.
© 2010 by Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.
