Yvonne Domenge hopes families will touch it, kids will climb on it and couples will crawl inside to kiss.

The internationally-recognized artist from Mexico City was in Richmond last week surveying a site at Garry Point Park where her newest piece of public art will be installed. Wind Waves, or Olas de Viento, in Spanish, is the latest artwork that will be installed as part of the Vancouver Biennelle, a public art celebration that, for the first time, is extending into Richmond.

Installation is expected to take place later this month.

Already one piece is up here, Dennis Oppenheim’s Arriving Home at Vancouver International Airport, and others are planned.

Domenge’s carbon steel sphere is as unique as its negative spaces, which create dramatic view corridors to where the Fraser River meets the ocean.

“The place itself, it had to be something that reminds you of the waves of the sea, the waves of the wind and the waves of the intensity of life,” she says in an telephone interview from a Vancouver hotel.

The circular form is intensely red and full of curves and movement.

Created in her studio in Mexico, the 10-ton, 4.5-metre-tall sculpture was loaded onto a container, trucked to the coast and brought here by boat.

Domenge says the Steveston site, and its foot and boat traffic, is perfect for her piece.

“All this movement at the sea, all these kinds of boats, the fishermen and the Japanese community—it’s quite a rich place for what I want, that I want families to get involved with it,” she says. “Public art belongs to the people, and it belongs to the interaction with everybody.”

Other public art pieces created by Domenge have found homes in France, Italy, Abu Dhabi, Mexico and the United States. She has over 40 solo exhibitions and 200 group exhibitions around the world on her resume, including a show at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Her work is primarily spherical, each finished with washable paint for graffiti artists who might get a little too close to her work. That’s the close communication with the public—in all its forms—she welcomes.

“I allow this and I prefer it.”

A native of Mexico City, Domenge was born and raised in an environment where listening to live classical music was part of everyday life. Her father was a lawyer and played several musical instruments. She studied psychology, but also art, which won out, learning from artists in Mexico City, Montreal and Washington DC.

Domenge is an artist with a social conscience, intent on improving the lives of people in her country while boosting art appreciation. Her latest social project has taken her to the streets of the industrial Mexico City neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, where she’s taught people how to make sculptures out of scrap.

“It’s a very forgotten and violent community. So what I did is teach them to use the same parts they used to repair trucks and cars—to use them in a creative way to make horses, or crocodiles or ants or whatever their dream was.”

Since she began her quest, violence in the community has dropped.

“Creative art always redeems you,” she says.

Wind Waves will be auctioned off once the Vancouver Biennale wraps up in 2011.