Freyja Whitney grew up in Ballard’s Sunset Hill neighborhood and would get stuck, like all locals, waiting on the bridge. She would pause and look up at the towers.
“I’ve always stood and just wondered…is anyone in there? What is going on?”
This year she found out what was inside.
Whitney is a freelance animator and illustrator now based in Seattle’s Ravenna neighborhood, and was selected for the 2025 SDOT Bridge Artist in Residence program. It’s a partnership between the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and the Seattle Department of Transportation that embeds artists in the historic towers of the Fremont and University Bridges. Her assignment location was the northwest tower, the one that features the Rapunzel sculpture.
“I was like, ‘Ah, I’m the Rapunzel now,” Whitney said.
In June, Whitney emerged from the Rapunzel tower with “Life in the Cut,” an 18-minute documentary short now available to watch on YouTube. The film blends Whitney’s hand-crafted animation with interview audio from three people who know the bridge from very different vantage points: Greg Silcox, City of Seattle Bridge Operations Supervisor; Lee Marriott, a longtime mariner; and Becca Johnson, a NOAA Fisheries Biologist.
The film opens with one of its subjects giving voice to the bridge itself, the result of a warm-up question Whitney posed before diving into the real interview.
“I started with some really goofy questions,” she said. “Like, okay, you are the Fremont Bridge… what is that like?” Marriott gave an answer so succinct and poetic that it became the film’s opening monologue.
Working in the northwest tower, Whitney discovered the bridge opens about 35 times a day, which was far more often than she expected as someone who’d waited on it her whole life. From her desk she would watch the orange lift span rise past the window as boats passed underneath. She also noticed that crows had developed a habit of riding the crossbar as it lifted.
“It’s not these separate elements of there being pedestrians and cars and boats and wildlife,” she said. “It’s like all those things are always interacting and intersecting within this creature that people have constructed.”
The artistic process was deliberately handmade. Whitney carved an entire typeface into linoleum blocks, printing each letter by hand up to 10 times to achieve a gradient of ink density she could use to animate text on screen. She wanted the film to carry the same texture as the bridge itself.
“You get up to the bridge and there’s just layers and years of paint that’s chipped and getting painted over, and moss growing in every crevice,” she said. “I really wanted to get that sense of age and texture.”
In an era when AI-generated animation is increasingly common, she wanted the craft to be visible. The linocut prints and sketches from her process are displayed alongside the film at the SDOT Bridge Artists in Residence Showcase.
“Look, here’s the stuff. I did it. I did it by hand. There’s no chucking labor onto some huge energy suck that’s scraping and stealing other people’s art,” she said. “This is from people that interacted with the bridge, through me, to the screen. All only people involved.”
The film premiered at a public opening reception June 4 at ARTS at King Street Station, where roughly 1,200 people came through. Mayor Katie Wilson attended with her daughter and stopped to watch the film.
“Life in the Cut” is available on YouTube. The physical work from Whitney’s process remains on display at ARTS at King Street Station, 303 S. Jackson St., Top Floor, through Aug. 8. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and until 8 p.m. on First Thursday art walks.
More of Whitney’s work can be found at freyjaw.com and instagram.com/freyjawart/.
Leave a Reply