4Culture and King County Wastewater Treatment Division (WTD) are excited to announce the selection of Sierra Nelson to create artwork for the Alki Wet Weather Treatment Station Standby Generator Project located near Constellation Park in West Seattle. The artwork will be inspired by the shoreline habitat and marine ecosystem adjacent to the site and the wastewater infrastructure that protects water quality in Puget Sound.

Sierra Nelson (she/they) is a poet, lyric essayist, and multimedia performance and visual artist, with an MFA in Poetry from the University of Washington. Sierra’s poetry books include The Lachrymose Report (PoetryNW Editions), and collaborative I Take Back the Sponge Cake (Rose Metal Press) and artist book ISOLATION created with visual artist Loren Erdrich.
As founder and president of Seattle’s Cephalopod Appreciation Society, she has curated all-ages science-and-art happenings featuring science talks, poetry, music, dance, film, and mini-parades in celebration of the octopus, squid, chambered nautilus, cuttlefish, ammonites, and nautiloids. Sierra is also editor of the book Three Hearts: An Anthology of Cephalopod Poetry (World Enough Writers), featuring cephalopod-inspired work by 129 contributors from around the world.

A MacDowell Fellow, Jack Straw Writers Fellow, and Carolyn Kizer Prize winner, Sierra has published work in numerous anthologies and journals including the Cascadia Field Guide, I Sing the Salmon Home, and WA 129, and has had work featured in King County Metro buses, the Seattle Aquarium, the Slovenian Natural History Museum, soundboxes along Denny Way for the ALL RISE project, and an installation incorporating Nordic runes on lava stones at the SÍM Gallery in Iceland. Sierra also co-founded internationally acclaimed literary performance art groups The Typing Explosion and Vis-à-Vis Society, working in poetry, theater, dance, film, music, audio and visual installations and interactive happenings.

Recently a Youth Community Liaison for 4Culture’s Poetry in Public program, Sierra also works with both youth and adults teaching poetry in diverse settings including schools, hospitals, universities, detention centers, parks and libraries, through a variety of partnerships including Writers in the Schools (WITS), Hugo House, Centrum, University of Washington, and beyond.

The selection panel was impressed by the accessibility of Sierra’s community-based social practice work as well as her emphasis on joy and wonder, depth of experience and comfort working in a variety of mediums, balance of organizational skills and creativity, and demonstrated interest in sea creatures and marine life. Over the coming months, Nelson will embark on place-based research into the natural, social, and cultural history of the area, gain a deeper understanding of the water systems and work of the Wastewater Treatment Division, and engage with community members. This research and engagement will inform the artwork and open up a wide range of potential outcomes.

Sierra says, “I’ve been an avid tide-pooler in the Pacific Northwest since I was a little kid, and water and marine creatures have been an important throughline in my creative and teaching practices. I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to dive deep and listen closely to the unique human-fellow creature-plant-water-weather collaborative ecosystem at Alki, and to develop a creative project that works with delight and mutual listening to deepen our understanding.”
We look forward to working with Sierra through the process of developing artwork that stimulates public imagination and curiosity, raises awareness of and appreciation for critical hidden infrastructure, and fosters an emotional connection to wastewater management and its effect on the marine ecosystem of the Salish Sea. In the meantime, consider the question Sierra posed to the selection panelists: “If you were to make a telephone call to a sea creature or water being, who would you call or want to receive a call from?”