In April 2024 an adult male gray whale came ashore on the east side of Vashon Island. The Vashon Nature Center was called, obtained a NOAA permit to recover the bones for educational use, and began what turned into a two-year community project. The whale was nicknamed Singer.
This summer, Singer went up in the atrium of the Vashon Center for the Arts.
What it took
The numbers are the story here, because they are the argument.
Thirty whale ambassadors contributed roughly 400 volunteer hours. One hundred and fifty Vashon high school students helped catalog and label bones as part of ninth-grade curriculum. One eighth grader spent more than seventy hours 3D-scanning all 164 bones. The Coop provided space for solar bleaching. Pacific Research Labs donated equipment and expertise. The Nature Center worked throughout with tribal contacts and local partners.
That is not a project a single organization delivered. It is an island doing something together over two years, mostly in unglamorous stages, with a lot of people handling bones in the sun.
What Ela Lamblin made
Island artist Ela Lamblin built the sculpture, and it is not a standard articulated skeleton on a stand. It is a work of art that carries the sheer size of the animal, combining the real bones with metalwork, and it moves. A slow wave travels through the vertebrae, a tidal motion that makes the whole thing read as alive rather than mounted.
It is free to see, Monday through Sunday, noon to five, at Katherine L. White Hall, 19600 Vashon Hwy SW.
Why it matters beyond the art
Singer arrived during a hard stretch for gray whales. Strandings along this coast have been elevated for years, and the animals that wash up are frequently underweight. A dead whale on a beach is a data point in a system under strain, and the Salish Sea is where that strain lands closest to home for us.
What the Nature Center did with this one was refuse to let it be only that. The bones became curriculum, then a scanning project, then a sculpture, and now a fixed point in a public building where lectures and student programming and conversations about ocean health can happen with the animal in the room.
That move, from a loss to a shared object that keeps teaching, is close to the center of what regeneration means in practice. Not a restoration of what was, but a deliberate re-weaving of the thing that happened into the life of a place. It also happens to be a working demonstration of the two capacities that Regenerate Vashon keeps coming back to: intergenerational participation, and organizations that partner instead of duplicating.
Supporting the work
The Vashon Nature Center’s Adopt-A-Bone campaign continues to fund the project, and the Vashon Center for the Arts accepts donations directly.
Go see him. Then go look at the water.