Naval Air Station Whidbey Island is home to the new Pacific Northwest Naval Air Museum.

Open year round, this museum features a lovingly restored World War II Catalina and celebrates naval aviation through exhibits, tours, reenlistments and events.

Information at PNWNAM.org.

[Humming] Clay was here long before the humans.

People have been making figures out of clay forever.

And it has its own energy that moves just like a body.

You know, you have a shoulder, you push it, and it stays.

It's Earth.

It's like... what we're made out of.

[Humming] For millennia, the land abutting the southernmost tendril of the Salish Sea was a thriving trade center for the Nisqually and Squaxin tribes.

When settlers arrived in the 1840s, they dubbed this place Olympia for its views of the lofty Olympic Mountains, and soon it became the capital of the Washington Territory.

Northwest of downtown, the Cooper Point Peninsula resembles a flame flickering upward.

This leafy landmass is where sculptor Aisha Harrison lives and works on acreage their family has owned for four generations.

Harrison's deep Pacific Northwest roots are visible in the thick branches and bodies of their work — including a big leaf maple created in foam for a recent solo show at th Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.

At their home studio in Olympia, Harrison often begins a sculpture with an improvizational technique known as “touch drawing,” using tissue paper and ink to create sketches of whatever comes to mind — a spiritual way to tap into heritage and identity.

A lot of your pieces they're... the boundary between human and nature is unclear.

- Yeah.

Because we are actually a part of nature.

- Exactly.

I mean, I definitely feel like I was a tree in a past life.

You really think about your own body when you see your work.

Excellent.

That's what I want.

Harrison was studying Spanish at Grinnell College when a chance visit to a ceramics class bent their life path toward clay.

When shaping the earthy medium, Harrison feels an existential connection to everything all at once.

So you have that image in your mind?

Yes, I have this image with the head, and then the two trees and then roots coming down, and then the hair somehow being with the roots.

I'm going to just start by putting the head, kind of getting the head shape on there.

When you start thinking about the head and the head shape and the features, I know sometimes it's your own face.

- Yep.

- Sometimes it's parental faces and people you know.

Does that emerge just as you're making it, or do you have a specific image in your mind when you, when you start sculpting?

It kind of emerges, I would say.

I also use like books and the internet, even old photographs, and find people who feel like they have some kind of kinship with me.

I find, you know, people who look like they might be queer.

Do you remember what your early area of interest was?

I was trying to figure out what to make work about, and then I sort of decided to start making work about my identity, - Yeah.

- as a Black biracial person, because the ancestral stuff was starting to be more present.

Harrison say their ancestors provide guidance during the creative process, sometimes even encouraging them to sing while making work.

They kind of encourage me to, like, just be who I am all the way without trying to conform to other people's ideas of Blackness or mixed-ness.

Hair has been a sculptural actor in my work forever.

It's kind of loaded, and I can move my feelings around it into the work.

So what I love about this is that I can turn this hair into a tree and that, or into roots, and that feels very grounding for me, and like a sense of belonging in a way that I haven't had in my life.

In addition to Clay, Harrison works in bronze and more recently, pink foam used as an armature for large pieces that would otherwise be too unwieldy.

For a new public art commission on the UW Tacoma campus, Harrison is creating a life sized bronze table, bench, and figure to represent a neighborhood gathering.

Called “What We Tend Will Grow,” the table will be embedded with 350 ceramic seeds, each made by a community member.

This is gonna get covered over with oil clay, and so you're not going to see this at all.

And I'll be able to do a lot more detail.

What is the figure doing?

- The torso will be like leaning over and then one arm will be on the table.

I know that they're going to be gender nonconforming.

I know they're going to have headphones on, and I know they're going to just have one on.

So the one ear will be open.

I know I'm going to base it on a Black person.

The table sculpture is Harrison's second large-scale public artwork.

The first, a striking bronze called “Woman with Graves at Her Back” sits at the edge of the water in Olympia's West Bay Park, looking out toward the Olympic Mountains.

For me, that piece represents this ancestor that I've talked to a lot of times in this realm that I go to when I'm doing the touch drawing.

She basically told me she was the first one from my line to reach these shores in chattel slavery.

She saw a lot of people die.

She really wanted to be, like in a place that is beautiful and calm and peaceful.

And she also has a lot of difficult emotion.

So that's why the cavity is out in her belly.

And you said the community has started interacting with that piece in a way you didn't expect.

- People started leaving flowers.

They started leaving notes inside the cavity.

People see her as like an altar space to kind of honor people I think that they have lost.

That is beautiful.

- Yeah.

And then she's looking out in this, like, kind of amazing view of the Salish Sea and just the mountains.

It's like perfect, you know?

With works in which braids take root, shoulders sprout forests, and throats sing with wildlife, Harrison emphasizes a porous boundary between humans and nature — a border that once prodded, falls away.

♪ I'm worthy of my purpose ♪ ♪ I am ♪ ♪ My ancestors' dream ♪ ♪ Even if I just breathe.

♪ This series was made possible in part with the generous support of Pacific Northwest Naval Air Museum.