There’s a version of public art in airports that exists to fill space. You’ve seen it. Regional motifs stretched across terminal walls, something to glance at between gates.
Orlando Springs does something entirely different. It asks you to slow down inside a space designed to move you through it.
Artist Margaret Ross Tolbert has spent decades in Florida’s freshwater springs — observing, documenting, painting from inside the thing she’s representing. Her work at MCO’s Terminal C is ecological testimony built from that time: hundreds of mosaic paintings, an acrylic map of the Floridan Aquifer Springsheds system, and eight new large-scale canvases, two of them thirty feet long. The escalator ride up from the domestic bridge was designed to feel like passing through a waterline — and it works.
When the installation relocated from Terminal A to Terminal C, we were brought in to handle the full scope. The original mosaic paintings came down from Terminal A one at a time, documented and sequenced so that the visual logic of the installation could be reconstructed precisely in the new space. Then came the large-scale work: eight new paintings transported directly from Tolbert’s studio in Gainesville, each one requiring its own handling decisions around size, surface, and the particular vulnerabilities of works that haven’t yet been through the rigors of institutional travel.
Those went up after hours — which, in a live airport terminal, means working inside access windows, around security protocols, in a building that never fully goes to sleep even when the gates are quiet. The whole project unfolded across multiple phases over several months, with each stage contingent on the one before it. GOAA documented some of the process as it happened, capturing our crew on the ground in the timelapse below — a rare look at what this kind of installation actually looks like from the inside.
The Floridan Aquifer runs beneath most of Florida, mostly invisible. Tolbert has spent a career making it visible. Getting to be part of showcasing that work, in a way that honors what it’s about, is exactly the kind of project that reminds us why we do what we do.
We’re proud to have been part of bringing Orlando Springs home!
If you’re coordinating a project that needs this level of care — transport, reinstallation, multi-phase installation in complex environments — we’d love to talk. Reach out to us at preparatorsolutions@gmail.com or schedule a consultation here.
