Alaska sculptor Rachelle Dowdy installed Loon, a sculpture at Bishop’s Beach Park on October 15, 2014. Dowdy’s proposal was one of 65 applications submitted from artists nationwide to Bunnell Street Arts Center’s Old Town AIR Public Art call, funded by ArtPlace America. Dowdy received $15,000 for the sculpture, including an artist’s fee and material costs. Dowdy is close to finishing the sculpture. The grant also includes $1,000 for future maintenance.Now living in Anchorage, Dowdy received a bachelor of fine arts in 1996 from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She has shown widely throughout Alaska, including a 2011 show at Bunnell, and has done several public art commissions. People are probably most familiar with “From Here to There and There to Here,” a collection of goose sculptures at the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, and “Wilderness, Wildlands and People,” four animal sculptures at the Anchorage Museum. The Old Town loon sculpture is most similar in design and structure to the museum pieces. Dowdy’s sculptures often feature creatures in human poses or expressions. Her loon sculpture is about 8 or 9-feet tall with an arm holding a windsock on a 12-foot pole — “sort of an Egyptian feel,” Dowdy said of it. Dowdy used the same ferroconcrete process for her loon as she did for the Anchorage Museum pieces. The base is a welded steel armature that’s covered in blueboard foam. Dowdy shaped the foam into the piece’s basic form and then wrapped it with metal lath and wire. read more (http://homernews.com/homer-features/arts/2014-09-17/council-considers-old-town-art-sculpture)