A thousand bricks from a demolished military hospital at Victoria International Airport will be used to create a memorial honouring Second World War airmen.
The Victoria Airport Authority unveiled plans Thursday for The Lost Airmen of the Empire, to be constructed on Hospital Hill on the north end of the airport’s property. The $160,000 project, commissioned by the airport authority, will be created by Victoria artist Illarion Gallant with a September completion date.
Seating areas at the memorial will be made from bricks salvaged from a former hospital on the site. The main feature will be 25 giant feathers, each 31Ú2 metres high, constructed from Corten steel.
Gallant, speaking at an announcement ceremony at Hospital Hill, said the feathers are styled after the plumage of the Cooper’s hawk, known for its agility and ferocity. About 170 names of airmen who died during the war while training at Patricia Bay Air Station will be inscribed on the metal feathers. The landscaped memorial area will include a row of red maple trees and signs.
A time capsule will be in the seating area. Gallant will solicit letters and emails from the community written to veterans and future veterans for the capsule. The airport’s website will post information on where to send them.
“I’m going to write a letter to my father [a Second World War veteran] and I’m going to place it in the capsule,” Gallant said.
The sculptor said he intends The Lost Airmen of the Empire to be “poignant, respectful and poetic.”
Gallant’s previous public artworks include the Commerce Canoe in Bastion Square and Bouquet of Memories, a cluster of giant metal flowers at the airport’s entrance.
Before it became Victoria International Airport in 1948, the site was a Royal Canadian Air Force base where thousands of British and Commonwealth airmen were trained annually. Accidents weren’t uncommon, with trainees dying in crashes at such locales as Bamfield, Tofino and Salt Spring Island.
Another speaker at the announcement was Wally du Temple — son of George Walter du Temple, commander of Patricia Bay Air Station during the Second World War. He said The Lost Airmen of the Empire will be a “marvellous memory of those men and women who served.” Du Temple congratulated the Victoria Airport Authority for initiating the Hospital Hill memorial. “It would have been so easy to ignore history. Sometimes that happens.”
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands, thanked veterans who supported the project in its early stages. She said the old hospital building was not worth saving because it required a seismic upgrade and “couldn’t be used for much.”
Gallant’s public art can also be seen in Calgary and Toronto. He just completed a 50-metre aluminum sculpture of a giant ivy vine, to be part of a North Vancouver condominium complex.
The Lost Airmen of the Empire is the first public memorial he’s done. “It gets my heart. It’s important that way, emotionally. The other [commissions], yeah, they’re important and I totally dig it. But there’s just something about this one. It’s personal.”
