For thousands of years, sailors, travelers and wanderers have turned their eyes toward the heavens, searching the vast darkness of the night sky for the North Star that would guide them forward.
While the North Star is our most enduring symbol of constancy amid uncertainty, its position above the North Pole isn’t as fixed as we believe it to be. A slight wobble in the Earth’s rotation shifts our perspective by just one degree every 72 years—a minuscule change that adds up with each passing generation. In ancient Egypt, it was Thuban—not Polaris—that held the title of the North Star. Our most recent was a pair of stars, Kochab and Pherkad, and our next will be Gamma Cephei.
Every 26,000 years, the north polar axis completes a full rotation through the sky, and the cycle of North Stars begins anew.
When sculpture and performance artist George Ferrandi (B.F.A. ’93) learned of this phenomenon, she wanted to create a new tradition to celebrate this celestial changing of the guard. She spent five years constructing a series of large-scale illuminated paper sculptures, commissioning new orchestral works, and engaging local artists and community members in her process—only to have the ceremonial debut destroyed by a natural disaster.
The sculptures sat in storage for another five years as Ferrandi waited for a new opening in the universe. Last year, that moment finally presented itself and Super!Giant!Jump!Star! premiered in Richmond’s Abner Clay Park—the solo featured work for 1708 Gallery’s annual InLight exhibition. The Richmond Symphony, indie-pop musician Mirah and the United Voices of Ebenezer performed. Several VCUarts students helped construct a new addition to Ferrandi’s line-up of sculptures. And hundreds of Richmonders came out to create their own lanterns and light up the night sky.
“When we first started talking about doing this in Richmond, it seemed like a revelation,” Ferrandi says. “There’s such an excitement about public work and outdoor events and live music and interdisciplinary projects.
“And then I realized this wasn’t a circuitous route to the right answer. Richmond is where I got started as an artist. It’s no coincidence that the project evolved the way it did.”
Big exhalations, tiny inhalations
Ferrandi describes her work as “art all the way down,” where the process of creation and community engagement is the practice, and every element is its own work of art.
It’s a practice that traces its earliest roots to VCUarts and the late Joe Seipel, former dean. Ferrandi chose to major in Sculpture and Extended Media after Seipel visited her Art Foundation class and introduced the expansiveness of the field. She later took classes with Seipel and worked as his teaching assistant and studio assistant.
“His broad definition of sculpture and his interdisciplinary approach—the way he used sculpture as a departure point for performance, along with the humor in his work—all shaped my sensibility,” she says.
“I once wrote to Joe that his ‘sparkling-eyed inventiveness completely shaped the way I move through the world,’ and that he was my model for generous community-building and joyful, out-of-the-box thinking.”
In her first major professional project, Cloud Seeding Circus, Ferrandi began to experiment with the idea of “art all the way down.” She and nine other visual artists created a mobile installation, exhibition space and vehicle for performance, and spent three years bringing the caravan to art venues. In addition to sculpture, video, installation and performance art, admission tickets and posters were editioned prints and viewers were participants in the re-contextualized circus.
A later project with the Fleisher Art Memorial, Wherever There is Water engaged the South Philadelphia community. Ferrandi collected stories and sketches of residents that she wove into a larger narrative. Others came to the Fleisher to create illuminated sculptures and paper lanterns that were carried in a parade that progressed through the narrative.
“That’s when my studio practice changed,” Ferrandi says. “I started wanting to work with people and not be entirely alone in my studio.
“Now, I oscillate. I like to describe my practice as a kind of breathing. There are these big exhalations with hundreds of people, and then there are these tiny inhalations where it’s just me working on something in clay.”
Lying in wait
Collaboration and impermanence are common themes in Ferrandi’s work—and both are at the heart of Jump!Star.
The project starts by posing a question: How on Earth will we say goodbye to Polaris?
Ferrandi believes the answer can’t be invented by one person—including herself—so she spent five years bringing together scientists, musicians, artists and arts organizations, and community members to collaborate around the ideas of developing a new tradition.
“Honestly, it grew from the inside out,” she says. “It started very small, and then it gained momentum with people’s interest in it. There was excitement about this idea of passing something down through the generations that could be in place when the next North Star moves into position.”
Jump!Star grew to include 11 illuminated paper sculptures, one for each of the stars that will serve as our North Star. The sculptures were built using a traditional Japanese process called Nebuta, and were intended to dance in a celestial parade with choreography by New York artist Alan Calpe and music by Mirah.
Jump!Star was set to premiere on June 15, 2019, in Kansas in conjunction with the annual music festival, Symphony in the Flint Hills. Ferrandi and her collaborators assembled for a dress rehearsal the night before—just hours before a tornado ripped through the festival site.
While the event was canceled, the sculptures survived. But the months that followed brought the Covid-19 pandemic and a period of global isolation. Ferrandi shifted focus to George’s Lovely Variety, a print newsletter with writings and drawings about the cosmos, Covid-era domestic life, animals and sea monsters—delivered to subscribers’ doorstep each month of 2021.
Meanwhile, Jump!Star lay dormant.
“For five years I paid to store the sculptures with no venue and no momentum,” Ferrandi says.
“By the end of 2024, I had decided: if no presenter stepped forward, I’d set them up in storage in December, invite a few friends to see them, and then dismantle them in January.”
Before that day could come, however, Ferrandi received a call. Seipel was preparing a retrospective, Joe Seipel: Yours & Mine, at the Anderson at VCUarts. 1708 Gallery, which he co-founded, asked if there was a former student he could recommend for a parallel exhibition. Seipel suggested Ferrandi.
“I really did make it a habit never to say no to Joe,” she says. once & hopeful stars opened at 1708 Gallery in August 2024 and featured several of the Jump!Star sculptures, which Ferrandi brought out of storage. That’s when talks began to revive the project at the gallery’s annual InLight exhibition the following year.
‘The birth of a sprout is the death of a seed’
On October 17 and 18, Richmonders gathered in Abner Clay Park for a two-night celestial ceremony and the premiere of Super!Giant!Jump!Star!.
At a table near the entrance, children drew pictures on white paper to be wrapped around small electric lanterns. Across the park, the Richmond Symphony performed the world premiere of Jherek Bischoff’s original symphony for Jump!Star. Nearby, attendees walked among the illuminated sculptures before learning the songs and movements for the ceremonial procession.
In the year between her solo exhibition at 1708 Gallery and InLight, Ferrandi’s ties to the city—and to VCUarts—have only deepened. Last summer, several sculpture students and recent alumni worked with Ferrandi to create Iota Cephei, a 12th addition to the Jump!Star project. The sculpture was later on view in Big Top Energy: Schemes & Souvenirs, an exhibition at the Anderson that traced Ferrandi’s evolution as an artist, leading up to the premiere of Super!Giant!Jump!Star!.
In addition, Richmond-based artists and performers Cassie Works and Egbert Vongmalaithong recruited a team of improvisers to represent “almost” future North Star Kappa Draconis as a fiery flock that swirled through the procession.
The morning after the ceremony in Abner Clay Park, Ferrandi gathered with collaborators and artists for another farewell—this one to the Jump!Star project, at least in its current form.
About 60 people stood in a circle around the sculptures, their right hand on their heart, their left hand on the back of the person next to them, as Zuzana Ernst led a sound meditation. The First Galactic Season Ceremony continued with a chant and dedication from members of Richmond Zen.
“We felt our heartbeats and then we gathered that energy in our hands and projected it into the future,” Ferrandi says. “Then we walked around and gave it to each sculpture. It was surprisingly touching to give these objects gratitude.”
Ferrandi invited everyone to cut sections of the sculptures to take as artifacts before disassembling the pieces for new purposes. The steel wire from the frames went to salvage, the copper wire to an artist who builds exclusively from found and recycled materials. The sculpture bases went to local puppet collaboratives. Ferrandi took the lightbulbs for a future project.
Just before the work that had been Ferrandi’s North Star for more than a decade fractured into stardust, she recited “Song for a Supernova Ceremony,” a poem she had written for the moment:
The birth of a sprout is the death of a seed.
The new day is the end of the night.
Finally seeing the thing you’ve anticipated for years
Means now it is over and you have seen that thing.
Even if you haven’t been waiting at all,
Now it is over and we have seen that thing.
Standing in a circle after sharing something meaningful–
A bloodline, a worldview, a service, a circus—
Standing in a circle is the correct shape to talk about endings.
I’m trying to get to the part where this ending is a beginning;
Where one train hides another. Where all the odds hang even.
Where the sky is indistinguishable between dusk and dawn.
And the circle is a smooth groove all the way around.
Learn more about this celestial ceremony, Super!Giant!Jump!Star! at www.jumpstar.love.
