Salmon Run | Part 1

Hi, I’m Susan Schelle. I’m the artist who created Salmon Run. Salmon Run was commissioned by the Toronto Skydome in 1989. And at the time that I did this, the area down near where the Skydome was being built was very bleak and I felt it needed some kind of oasis. I also felt that if I was going to do a fountain I wanted to do a fountain that had volumes of water, rather than a spigot in the middle shooting up in the air. So, my original concept of the fountain was to have as much water as I possibly could, coming over the walls of it, in conjunction with the idea of having spawning salmon, which are Atlantic Salmon, over scaled, gigantic Atlantic Salmon, which at one time were part of Lake Ontario system and then became extinct and were reintroduced 5 or 6 years ago into Lake Ontario. So, they’re actually spawning salmon, so they’re in this frantic lust climbing this series of stairs in the fountain and going through the wall into this much quieter contemplative area at the back of it.

And then the second part to the fountain is the inlaid medallion, which also continues the narrative of the fountain. And it’s behind the fountain and towards the entrance of the CN Tower. The medallion is this 65-foot circle that is sandblasted in granite and it has the solar system in tune with the salmon spawning. So it has these large circles of inlaid bronze, the same bronze from the salmon that are inlaid into this sort of medallion area that is flat in the ground. It’s flat. You walk on it, drive on it, whatever. And it has the Great lakes sandblasted into it. It’s called Upstream.

Have you heard Part 1 yet?

Runtime 00:01:52