The creators of a new public sculpture on Birmingham’s Hugh Kaul Walking Trail hope its 26-foot representation of a water droplet will create ripples of a different kind.

“Inception” is the creation of public artist Deedee Morrison, a Birmingham native who spent about a year on the piece from preliminary research to its dedication this past week, just in time for the beginning of the World Games on Thursday.

The piece incorporates a 5-foot steel sphere, encased in 269 sections of hand-cut railroad steel, weighing more than 14,000 pounds.

Meaning “the establishment or starting point of an activity,” Inception uses steel to create the image of a drop of water at the moment it hits the surface of a pond.

As Morrison explained, the concept of the droplet is for “regeneration or new life into the landscape. Nothing erases the past - in fact it becomes a distant memory, or a ripple in time. But it is how we honor our past that determines our future.”

The Hugh Kaul Trail, a project of the Freshwater Land Trust, connects 41st Street to the Continental Gin Complex through a 1.5 mile segment.

This past Tuesday, members of Birmingham’s Sunrise Rotary Club dedicated the statue and its surrounding plaza on the trail, with several rings of trees surrounding “Inception,” like the ripples in a pond.

The club raised more than $440,000 for the project, according to incoming president Norman Jetmundsen.

“We wanted an outdoor sculpture that would be identified with Sunrise Rotary Plaza,” Jetmundsen said. “We wanted to create an Instagrammable moment, so that when people go there, they want to get a picture.”

The plaza is located near Avondale Springs, where the waters were a key ingredient in Birmingham’s steel and mining past. And so the sculpture uses elements of Magic City history to create something new, symbolizing the city’s transformation and renewal.

The 80-pound rail components that make up the sculpture represent the geology and minerals of Jones Valley, the historic “ingredients” of the city.

“A spring is like a seedpod,” Morrison said. “Water is the regenerative factor in everything. I just imagined if you could take all our past and wrap it up, drop it into the present, and you get hope for the future. You start all over again, you breathe new life into a city.”

Designing the larger plaza was Jane Reed Ross, senior landscape architect with Goodwyn Mills Cawood. Surrounding the sculpture are rings of bald cypress and Princeton elm trees, echoing the circular nature of the plaza.

“Initially, we chose that spot because we wanted to highlight the railroad roundhouse,” Ross said.

“Now, there’s no longer railroads, or foundries, or any of that industry, but the plaza has a ripple effect in a different effect. It’s creating and activating an outdoor space along a trail that encourages people to have active lifestyles. It’s adding quality of life in a different way.”

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