Created specifically for the San Juan Islands Museum of Art, Alison Stigora’s Constellation transforms the museum’s atrium through an immersive installation of suspended sculpture, light, and sound. More than one hundred individual forms made from driftwood and reclaimed shattered glass hover throughout the space, catching and refracting the changing light. Together, these distinct elements form a larger whole, a constellation that echoes both the geography of the San Juan Islands and the networks of connection through which we orient ourselves in the world.

Stigora has worked with wood for more than two decades, exploring its capacity to register time, change, and transformation. Since moving to the Pacific Northwest in 2017, driftwood has become central to her practice. For Constellation, weathered branches and roots, materials shaped by water, erosion, and decay, are covered with fragments of broken glass. What might otherwise suggest damage or decay becomes luminous, scattering light across the museum’s walls, floor, and visitors themselves.

The installation extends this transformation through sound. Developed from field recordings made on San Juan Island, including ferries, wind, waves, and other sounds of the surrounding environment, the audio shifts between deep, rumbling tones and delicate, chime-like sounds. Stigora describes the work as an exploration of “darkness to light, death to life, brokenness to beauty.”

Throughout Constellation, these apparent oppositions coexist: weight and suspension, destruction and beauty, disorientation and discovery. The title refers not only to stars, but to islands, people, materials, and experiences, individual points that acquire new meaning through their relationships to one another. While researching the islands’ history of celestial and maritime navigation, Stigora encountered an interpretive sign at the Radio Compass Station at Cattle Point on San Juan Island, recounting a Morse code message from a mariner seeking direction through the fog:
“What is my true bearing?”
DAH-DAH-di-DAH di-di-DAH DAH-DAH-DAH

An honest and deeply human question, it becomes a point of departure for Constellation. Rather than offering an answer, the installation invites us to dwell within uncertainty, to look upward, to wonder, and perhaps to see the familiar transformed.