DPW Completes Stabilization of Lyford Sculpture on Four Tree Island

The Portsmouth Department of Public Works is responsible for maintaining all of the City’s public works of art, ranging from Jerome Meadows’ fragile ceramic tiles embedded in the African Burying Ground Memorial to the massive steel sculpture by Terrance Parker commissioned for the Foundry Place Garage. One of the works that recently received special attention from DPW Facilities engineers is the Cabot Lyford sculpture, My Mother the Wind that has stood on Four Tree Island for the past 45 years.

Portsmouth Poet Laureate Tammi Truax showcased the work and its creator in her recent Sunday Advisory poem. Now the newly stabilized base for the sculpture ensures its presence on the waterfront for visitors to Four Tree Island to enjoy for years to come. DPW engineers were able to reposition stones that had rolled away from the original base of the sculpture and pour a new concrete footing. The inscription on the base remains, “For those who sailed here to find a new life.”   

My Mother the Wind was placed in 1975. It is one of four works created for the City of Portsmouth by the late Maine sculptor Cabot Lyford, who received the National Academy of Design's Sculpture Prize in 1990. Lyford’s work also appears in the collections of the Ogunquit Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, Portland Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Portland Public Art. A tribute to all the women who have immigrated to New England shores, the sculpture was carved from the same black granite used to create Fisherman’s Luck (the whale in Prescott Park) and Black Dolphin in the submariners’ memorial garden at the USS Albacore Park. The fourth Lyford work, the white granite Eagle, is located on the campus of Great Bay Community College at Pease.