Sculpture Battered : Davy Jones Too Harsh on Art

One year ago, Laguna Beach artist Ross Nathan Power sank a 5,000-pound, stainless-steel sculpture in the Atlantic Ocean near here to acquire a weathered underwater patina.

He got more weathering than he bargained for. The twisted metal helix, part of his “Treasures of Atlantis” series, lies in shambles on the ocean floor, the victim of careless boat anchoring and scuba-diving vandals.

“It looks like it is thousands of years old, and it has only been there a year,” Power said Monday.

“People have dropped their anchors on it then tried to break free from what they thought was coral. The metal has been bent back and forth so many times that it had metal fatigue, and actually broke. Vandals have scratched their names in the artwork and broken it apart. It’s in 10 pieces.”

Power and employees of a Key West salvage company, Sea Hunt Inc., plan to raise the chunks of statue with a crane Thursday. Sea Hunt employee Bill Irby said the pieces will be loaded onto a 110-foot boat and carried to Key West, where Power plans to weld them back together.

Intact, the work is 14 feet high and 50 feet long. It is made of more than 3,000 feet of stainless-steel tubing. It looks like a twisted radio tower and was designed for divers and snorkelers to swim through.

Power sank it June 10, 1986, in a 35-foot-deep sand bowl near John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. It was shipped by helicopter in six sections, then welded together, lowered into the sea and anchored in place.

“It did not break where the welding was,” he said.

Once the sculpture is repaired, Power plans to submerge it in Key West long enough to film it for an underwater video, then raise it permanently. He is working with art and environmental groups in Key West to raise money to put it on public display.

“It is not designed to stay underwater forever,” Power said. “I wanted to conjure up visions of lost civilizations to make people think.

“I felt that by submerging it underwater for a year, it would interact with the salt and the elements of the ocean and the artwork would gain that ancient patina, but it got more ancient than I thought.”

The sculpture was the second exhibit to be sunk there as part of Powers’ “Treasures of Atlantis” series. The first, a wavy stainless steel formation titled “Future Wave,” was sunk in 1985 and raised to make room for “No Turning Back.”

It took Power nearly two years to get the necessary permits, to get the anchor system approved by engineers and to show that there would be no negative environmental impact.

He is considering creating a permanent sculpture of poured concrete to display in the spot, but has made no definite plans.