Evelyn C. McDonald
Arts & Culture Reporter
July 27, 2017 9:52 a.m.
I finally found the first beach sculpture at Main Beach. It’s in the park at a beach access point between the Main Beach parking lot and Tarpon Street. Close up it’s lovely; photographs don’t do it justice. It is a flower with large multi-colored petals and a dark center section made up of what look like rounded pieces of wood. What the photo doesn’t show clearly is that underneath the flower are two other stems, one with an opening bud and the other with a closed bud.
Hurricane Matthew deposited large amounts of debris on our beaches. Other communities have transformed beach debris into art. Leigh Palmer, at the Convention and Visitors Bureau, shepherded the project here to highlight the Leave No Trace campaign. The big effort was collecting debris and storing it so that artists could look over the materials available. Art proposals were solicited and judged. The results are the five beach sculptures that were highlighted in the Observer a few weeks ago. The Main Beach sculpture is the northernmost of these installations. At each installation, a plaque identifies the artist and, in some cases, the materials used for the sculpture.
Moving down the coast from Main Beach, the next sculpture was at Seaside Park at the end of Sadler Road. It is placed just as you come into the parking lot and somehow blends in with the natural and man-made environment. It appears to be a group of kites taking flight. Among the materials used were plastic bags and nets.
Continuing south to Peter’s Point, you will find two sculptures. One is a huge piece of driftwood with parts of two paddles protruding from the top. The other looks like a tree house apartment building for birds. Oddly appropriate as it sits in the part of the Point next to the high rise buildings.
I haven’t made it to Burney Park yet but it has the fifth art installation. The first time I looked at the sculptures was over a month ago. When I went back last week, I wondered if there would have been vandalism. Sculptures displayed downtown two years ago were damaged. Amazingly all of the sculptures were intact.
Looking at them, I was struck by two thoughts. One was amazement at an artist’s ability to see form and structure in a pile of very raw materials. The sculptures grace the beaches with color and whimsy. The other was the realization that all of the materials were discards dumped on our beaches by the whims of a hurricane. An imaginative art program gave some of the debris new life. Our thanks should go to the Tourism
Development Council for fully funding this project, the Nassau County Board of Commissioners, and to the artists who made it possible.
Evelyn McDonald moved to Fernandina Beach from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. in 2006. Evelyn is vice-chair on the Amelia Center for Lifelong Learning and is on the Dean’s Council for the Carpenter Library at the UNF. Ms. McDonald has MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland’s University College and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan.
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