14 x 30 x 20 feet | mirror-polished stainless steel, hand-painted | 2026 | Permanent Commission | Kaiser Permanente Riverside Medical Center | Riverside, CA
Aerial Butterfly Garden moves through the rotunda of Kaiser Permanente Riverside Medical Center as a single drifting line. Forty-two mirror-polished stainless steel forms carry it — twenty-four following the curve of the rotunda wall, eighteen suspended overhead in the dome — tracing the path of the Santa Ana River, the water that shapes this region, as though a garden had lifted off the ground and gone with it.
The back of every form is hand-painted with a custom gradient. On the wall pieces the painted side faces in, so what you see is not the paint but the color it throws — a glowing drop shadow that surrounds each cut form and shifts with the light moving through the rotunda over the course of a day. Overhead the logic inverts. The painted backs face down, visible to anyone who looks up, and the color arrives directly rather than by reflection.
The mirror faces do the rest. They pull the rotunda into the work — the dome above, the light from the windows, the people crossing the floor — so the piece is never the same twice. This is the first room most patients and families see when they arrive, and I wanted it to hold something calm and moving at once, rooted in the place it was made for.
Commissioned by Kaiser Permanente for the rotunda of Kaiser Permanente Riverside Medical Center, Riverside, CA. Structural engineering by Metalab Studio.