Garden Under the Sea

Executive summary by darmansjah

Sculpatures morph into an artificial reef

GRENADA Twenty-six feet (8m) below the waters off Grenada’s Coast, a curious figure is undergoing a sea change. Seated upright at his desk, hands poised before a manual typewriter, the ‘Lost Correspondent’ is a gradually but visibly being consumed by time and the ocean. This memento mori of the days of print is just one sculpture among 65 that British-Guyanese artist Jason deCaires Taylor installed on the seafloor of mlinere Bay, near Saint George’s, Grenada, in 2006. A diving instructor as well as an artist, Taylor wanted to create objects that would respond to, and be clolonized by, their underwater environment. The surfaces of his sculptures are treated to be suitable for coral growth, a process that will take decades. The mutable forms, as they become something rich and strange, will help rebuild Grenada’s storm-ravaged reefs.

 

SEA CHANGE Desgined for transformation, sculptures in the water of Grenada include the 26 life-size figures of ‘ Vicissistudes,’ is 16 feet (5 m) down, and ‘The Lost Correspondent,’ 26 feet (8m) down.