California Wash, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, 1996

http://theharrisonstudio.net/?page_id=301



California Wash is a narrative work of landscape sculpture combining a garden that portrays the former wash ecology, light, pathways, mural and sculptural forms that address the transformations of this site that are the inevitable outcomes of urbanization.
A drainshed mural, drawn on the new Pico-Kentner outfall cover, represents the current human settlement pattern with the California Wash garden as a reasonable reflection of, or memorial to, that which once existed. The mural also contains bronze plaques inset into the concrete, images of certain of the original fauna of the area. It is a reminder of the original life web of the Pico watershed, and of the disappearance of bio-diversity and the region’s most precious resource, its water.