Towering sculpture appears on SLO County shoreline. What is it doing there?
A large, sweepingly angled steel monument rises nearly three stories high above a San Simeon bluff.
The 1,200-pound sculpture, titled “Shift,” was installed on the shoreline site between Highway 1 and the Pacific Ocean near Pico Drive on Oct. 1. For stability, it’s attached with earth anchors through a 1,600-pound steel mounting plate.
Unlike other monuments that have appeared suddenly across San Luis Obispo County and the world, however, “Shift” has a clear message — and a website, GlobalShift.info.
The seven-person team of designers and builders behind the sculpture want people viewing the art installation to recognize that the world is shifting apart in ruptures driven by inequality, politics and other factors.
It was “frustration on many levels” that triggered the creation of “Shift,” according to Shell Beach resident Warren Hamrick, the sculpture’s originator, architect and designer.
“We were sitting around in my office, talking about the state of the world,” he said via phone, “and how it seems to have changed, especially in the past 10 to 15 years … economically, politically, environmentally … on a lot of different levels.”
As he and his friends chatted that day, Hamrick was doodling, “sketching some ideas,” he explained.
His design went through “several iterations” before it was finalized,” he said. “Then it sat on my desk for literally months, if not years.”
When his friend, builder Charlie Main of Shell Beach, spotted the design recently, he told Hamrick, “Let’s build it!”
So they did, relying on the enthusiasm and skill of metalworker and welder Rob Foster of Atascadero and builder Neal Portlock of Cambria, as well as the energy brought to the project by Hamrick’s wife, Kathy Hamrick, Main’s wife, Terri Main, and Darcy Cleome of Cambria.
First, however, the team had to find a place to put their monument, which features two halves of the earth shifting apart along the globe’s axis.
That problem was solved when they reached an agreement with landowner Michael Hanchett of Cavalier Oceanfront Resort in San Simeon.
Within three weeks in September, the team had rounded up its materials and assembled the monument. After a mostly foggy summer at the shoreline, the skies cleared on installation day.
It’s not yet known how long the monument will stay in place at its temporary location.
The GlobalShift team members hope that each viewer stops and thinks about the sculpture means to them.
In a statement on the website, the GlobalShift team asks if the image represents the reality of “the state of the world today? Is it a representation of where we are headed? What could we do, or how would we shift to bring the two halves back together?”
“Everything doesn’t have to be so negative,” Hanchett wrote via email. “This is just a wake-up call.”
“We just want to trigger things in people’s minds, to call attention to the shift and put a positive shift on things,” Hamrick concluded, “to see what we can do as individuals to shift things back into alignment.”
