Sculptures' color, form, texture to bring Zen with a spin to Dalstrom Park

One of Suzy Hendrix's "Rock City" sculptures that will be installed at Dalstrom Park.

Memphis gets its own Park Güell next week with the installation of a whimsical sculptural series in Southwest Memphis’ Dalstrom Park. The seven-piece creation, titled “Rock City,” references the rural/urban dichotomy of a city park with shapes that are rock-like yet purposefully modern in look and feel.

The artist, Suzy Hendrix, says her concept was a Japanese Zen garden. “But I wanted to put an American pop art spin to it — mosaic in bright red and yellow. So it’s kind of like a natural shape in a natural surrounding but very unnatural.”

Artist Suzy Hendrix's "Rock City" sculptures will be installed at the entrances to Dalstrom Park's footpath.

Dalstrom Park in a 2006 file photo.

The end result is part environmental art, part meditative space and part playful structure a la Antoni Gaudí, whose aforementioned urban park in Barcelona, Spain, is perhaps the most immediate connection, informing, as it seems to do, the lively use of color, form, and tiled texture in Hendrix’s creation.

The musical identity of the Bluff City also figures into the title, “Rock City,” which is not lost on Hendrix, who has been a presence on both the local indie music and art scenes (she played tenor saxophone for several years behind late Detroit soul legend Nathaniel Mayer and will be touring Europe in the fall with another soul great, Geno Washington). But these days she says she prefers to be known as artist/musician — in that order.

Still, there’s a musicality of movement in the decorative flower-and-vine motifs of her sculptures, which are bejeweled by brilliant glass mosaic. Standing from 1 1/2 feet to 6 feet tall, the pieces will be installed at both entrances of Dalstrom Park’s footpath on Shelby Drive and Weaver. They were on display Friday only at Hendrix’s studio space inside 409 S. Main (home of Jay Etkin’s former gallery) before being crane-lifted out of the building and placed permanently in the park early this week.

Hendrix was selected by the UrbanArt Commission, which oversees art enhancement projects in the greater Memphis area, for the assignment. She had submitted a similar idea for a park in Frayser but the commission felt the 75-acre Dalstrom, with its size and abundance of trees, was a better fit.

“Dalstrom is really big and really beautiful,” says the commission’s director of public art, Elizabeth Alley. “We wanted something that would work with the landscape rather than putting art in more built-up areas like pavilions and picnic areas. These pieces contrast the surrounding trees and grass, so it works great within the landscape but it also works as markers for the trailheads on both sides of the park.”

Built on foundations of steel, concrete and fiber glass that were created, says Hendrix, with the help of a Franklin, Tenn., rock-climbing designer, the sculptures are equipped for the kind of outdoor wear and tear that comes with being in a public park.

“It’s ready for graffiti,” laughs the artist. “But you could still hurt it with a bullet — bullet-proof sealant is not on the market yet.”

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