Instrument Implement: Walla Walla Campanile, completed in 2008, is a sculpture measuring twenty-five and a half feet high and is located in front of the William A. Grant Water & Environmental Center at Walla Walla Community College. The Water & Environmental Center is designed as a common ground meeting place, to collectively garner consensus for the sake of a healthy watershed and the next seven generations. Art often serves as a catalyst to that consensus process and is the intent of the Walla Walla Campanile.
The sculpture, as Instrument, marks the passage of time as well as heralding the environmental conditions of the Walla Walla watershed. As Implement, the discs that once worked the local loess soils have been transformed into a campanile, which when combined with an ensemble of additional elements, embellishes the sculpture as allegory.
The sculpture is sited near Titus Creek and adjacent to the trail from the main campus to the Water & Environmental Center. Titus Creek flows past the Campanile and on to Mill Creek which then flows into the Walla Walla River and on to the Columbia River. At the confluence of Titus and Mill Creek, a panel supporting 144 stamped aluminum license plates presents poetic notions about the watershed by writers of the watershed. The plates have a reflective color background, which distinguishes one poem from the next. The contributing poets are Jennifer Boyden, Janice King, Dan Lamberton, and Katrina Roberts.
