A life-sized bronze sculpture embedded with 350 tiny clay seeds, each handmade by a Tacoma community member, will be installed on the UW-Tacoma campus in early 2027.

Sculptor Aisha Harrison has been building "What We Tend Will Grow," a piece centered on a round table with a lotus-pod surface, a bench and an androgynous figure leaning over the table with a baby on their back.

The table's legs descend like roots from the inset seed bowls, representing ancestry and mutual aid.

Harrison is an artist based outside Olympia whose family has owned acreage on the Cooper Point peninsula for four generations, held more than 17 "seed sessions" across the city to collect those 350 seeds. Participants sculpted small clay objects representing their hopes for the future at UW-Tacoma, Evergreen Tacoma, Tacoma Community College, the Tacoma Art Museum and other locations.

"Everyone made a small sculpture of their hope for the future," Harrison told Cascade PBS, describing the intent as "creating a feeling of belonging."

The results vary wildly.

A bear, a hand, a woman, an avocado. Together they form the table's communal surface, a chorus of anonymous hopes cast permanently in bronze.

One seed carries particular weight. Dr. Maxine Mimms, founder of Evergreen State College's Tacoma campus and a pillar of Black education in the Northwest, made one of the 350 before her death on Oct. 8, 2024, at age 96. Mimms had long championed the kitchen table as an organizing and teaching space, a concept Harrison built directly into the sculpture's design.

Once installed in a prominent outdoor location on campus, the piece will be fully interactive. People can sit at the table and bench, gather and talk, the way families do around a kitchen table. It is Harrison's first large-scale public installation, according to UW-Tacoma.

Harrison carved the armature from pink foam before covering it in oil clay and sending it to a foundry for bronze casting. Their process begins with "touch drawing," an art-therapy technique using tissue paper and ink to create rapid finger paintings that connect with ancestors and the subconscious.

The artist's earlier public work hints at how Tacoma might receive this one. "Woman with Graves at Her Back," a bronze figure at Olympia's West Bay Park, has become an informal altar. Visitors leave flowers, notes and offerings inside the figure's open body cavity without any prompt.

UW-Tacoma has not announced a specific unveiling date or campus location. The university's advancement office lists a contact for supporters interested in funding the project, suggesting fundraising remains active.