On October 12, 2002, collectors and friends Pat and Norman Webster took us to a local “crime scene”: less than a month before, the covered bridge in Capelton, a village not far from the village of North Hatley, had been destroyed by arson. Among the remains, were about more than a dozen steel girders, bent and twisted by the heat of the fire and the collapse of the bridge. Our friends asked us to make a sculpture out of this scorched and rusted metal which they purchased. We attempted to create as accurate a 1/10 model possible, reproducing the bend and twist of each girder. Using backhoe tractors as cranes, we bolted the girders to twelve-foot-tall posts to give to the structure a sensation of floating. No girder was stretched or bent from the original shape in which we had got them. (Satoshi Saito)

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The making of Bridge Ascending

2002-2003

Satoshi Saito