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The air smelled dead, of scorched paint and burnt heavy-weight oil. Karin Richardson was struck by how the stench overpowered the bay, its tide flats and the ocean.

"I walked out into this salvage yard. It was incredible."

This petite woman with spiky, rust-colored hair was surrounded by towering masses of carved-up metal in the North Spit graveyard of the New Carissa.

That day in October 1999, the professional artist, a native South Coast resident, had no inkling the shipwrecked wood-chip freighter would consume her imagination. It would claim an entire year of her life. She had no idea she would return time and again to the graveyard and cart away sheets of red-rust metal cut from the remains of the New Carissa

Now, Richardson's eerie blow-torched interpretation of the vessel's demise and its disastrous effects on the region's seagoing inhabitants is in its final days showing at the Coos Art Museum in downtown Coos Bay.

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Richardson became fascinated with the sea and its creations as youngster, bolting daily out of her house and across the county road, down to the beach, on the other side of the Rogue River's north jetty at Wedderburn. The sand and driftwood became the foundation for an interest in art that became her profession. Now, four decades later, it's reflected in totems she builds, blending sea-green glass and soft gray driftwood.

But the New Carissa set her on a different course, creating a massive museum-quality display that she won't allow in the New Mexico and Arizona galleries that sell her other works. She hopes it's destined to travel to other museums, other states, as a reminder.

Richardson first became acquainted with the ship when she was at her folks' house. It was the night of Feb. 3, 1999. They lived at Fossil Point, with a view looking over the Coos Bay channel and over the southernmost tip of the North Spit. They could see the ship steaming just offshore.

"Dad looks out and said, 'Boy, I'd hate to be laying out there tonight,'" Richardson recalled.

He loved to watch the ships calling on Coos Bay. But this night, the Pacific was rough, its waves whipped by a fierce winter storm.

"Anyway, he went to bed," she recalled wryly, "and so did the captain."

Richardson went home, but early the next morning, her phone was ringing. It was her dad. He wanted his camera.

A 594-foot freighter ran around this morning half a mile offshore near Horsfall Beach, just north of the Coos Bay bar. Breakers crashed around the vessel, as the U.S. Coast Guard worked to free the New Carissa. - The World, Feb. 4, 1999.

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Richardson was obsessed with the news, the fiasco as officials tried to free it from the sand and eventually the fallout as the misfortune became disaster.

Still, she went about her usual work. But one day, while seeking a rusty sheet of metal to use in a printing process, Richardson met up with the remains of the New Carissa.

She was scouring metal in the Charleston shipyard and jokingly told a man there she wanted steel like that from the New Carissa, metal "that looked like it had been bombed, burned and napalmed." He pointed her toward the North Spit.

There, huge helicopters - the kind typically seen hauling logs out of clearcuts - were flying the vessel's cut-up remains to shore. There in the salvage yard, with permission to photograph and eventually cart off the decaying steel, Richardson began to shape her idea.

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She moved the desktop-sized slabs of steel to a friend's yard, and having watched the salvors cut away at the disfigured ship offshore, Richardson set to work with her own blow torch. All the while, she obsessed about the shipwreck's aftermath. She was haunted by news reports that oil killed more than 2,000 seabirds as it slicked from the blown-apart hull and spread north during the hull's unearthly escape from salvagers to run aground again in Waldport.

"I had a sense of guilt," Richardson said, explaining her fascination with the birds. "I'd lived on the coast my whole life and knew nothing about them."

She began cutting holes through sheets of steel. Each sheet cut from a smokestack section represented a species. Each blob of hot metal that dripped away represented an individual, leaving a hole to cast a yellow circle of light against the wall in the museum display.

More than a dozen species.

Some common.

One endangered.

A total of 2,358 seabirds.

In digging for information about each, Richardson met up with scientists.

"She really is a very clever person to have been able to come up with these abstract forms and tie together the salvage and birds and the ocean and the beach," said Jan Hodder, who is an associate professor at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology in Charleston.

Hodder began teaching Richardson about the birds. She loaned her dead birds of each species from the school's collection of study skins. Richardson studied them and incorporated the forms into the exhibit.

"It was really one of the richest parts," Richardson said of learning intimate details about each of the avians. "The western grebe - it's a fisher that spears its fish. It has eyes, oh, red-hot eyes."

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The actual birds recovered dead on the beaches after the New Carissa are frozen away. They are in U.S. Fish and Wildlife's safekeeping while the government and ship's owners settle their lawsuits. But Richardson was curious how much mass their bodies would fill and she began making her own forms of the birds, actual-sized pellets of newspaper rolled in glue and then wood chips. The bodies are piled in a massive pyramid on the museum's first floor. They are stuffed in plastic garbage bags, piled meticulously in twos, up 20 feet or more to the museum's upstairs ceiling.

"I spent three months - seven days a week, 15 hours a day - making bird forms," she said.

Fish and Wildlife officials gave her special permission to use carcasses. She skinned them, boiled the bones, scrubbing them clean with toothbrushes. The grayish-white skulls, keel bones and gnarled spines are set in small sandboxes lining the walls of the exhibit.

"I was intrigued by it, ..." said Larry Mangan. "Karin just interpreted things in such a different dimension. I was moved by it."

The Bureau of Land Management wildlife biologist has spent the past five years focusing on the science of the New Carissa. He pored over not just dead birds, but the overall effects of the spill. He's helping compile a restoration plan due out this summer. The document is to detail every imaginable loss to the public caused by the shipwreck, from closed beaches and damaged habitat to effects on wildlife and how the ship's owner will make amends.

But for the average person in Coos Bay who might have wandered into the exhibit, Hodder and Mangan struggled to guess what people might glean from it.

"It serves as a reminder that it actually happened," Hodder said. "There were some consequences to wildlife and the birds are a symbol because they're so visible."

There's a larger connection with the whole North Pacific Ocean, Hodder went on. Many of the birds wintered off Oregon, but would have nested in lands as far north as Alaska.

Richardson, who has greeted her exhibit's visitors for weeks, said reactions have been mixed. Clad at times in a black turtleneck sweater, with a red-brown overcoat she became an intrinsic part of her own exhibit. Her voice echoed with explanations, and at times with enthusiasm as she answered questions.

Some people are aghast she would interject the political into the display. Some said they just don't get it. Others were mesmerized, returning again and again.

"That's really what this installation is about - how people minimize, dismiss and debunk the natural world," Richardson said.

In reflecting on a year's adventure, Richardson at first sips licorice root tea to calm her nerves. She thinks silently, with her eyes open wide. And still, she can't quite voice the words to explain what she hopes people discover in her work.

"I can't tell anyone what to think," she said finally.

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The New Carissa exhibit, "The Remains To Be Seen," ends Saturday at the Coos Art Museum, 235 Anderson Ave.