From his studio in Grayton Beach, artist and sculptor Steve Wagner smiles at the thought of his first public art installation in Arboleda Park at Alys Beach. At home, he sits back in his chair and envisions his mermaid safely nestled amid the crashing waves of yaupon holly in the new park located east of Caliza Pool and north of Nonesuch Way.
“I can just see her on a full moon night,” he said, “surrounded by yaupon holly shrubs that have been shaped to look like waves. I love that the experience is environmental. It reflects her essence.”
The "her" that he is referring to is Alys Beach’s art installation, Leda the Mermaid. At almost 1,800 pounds, Leda will be hard to miss. The stone sculpture is an enlarged version of his original sculpture, which he crafted by hand at his studio in Grayton Beach.
It was a bit of a process before Leda found her home in Alys Beach. Originally, Town Founder Jason Comer had approached Steve to create a fountain, but when Steve showed Jason a sculpture at his home, Steve decided to carve a new face with stylized eyes from the stone. Scales were added to her hair to evoke a mermaid, and Leda was born. But Alys Beach, being on the forefront of design, didn’t need a small sculpture. Jason and town architects Erik and Marieanne Khoury-Vogt envisioned something more befitting the grand scale of the community. Leda needed to grow. And she needed to grow by four feet.
To accomplish this, Steve worked with Digital Atelier to create a 3-D model of Leda and then had that model enlarged and carved out of a giant block of Styrofoam, coated with vinyl spackle, and then refined. This pattern version of Leda was used to craft a precise mold from which the sculpture was cast, which was placed into what Steve affectionately refers to as a giant steam oven. “She was steamed under pressure,” he said, “and came out at 7000 psi. She came out perfect.”
“Steve's sculptures have always been compelling to us as abstracted figural pieces,” Erik explained. “They are obviously inspired by the work of Modigliani but with a more humanized, softer interpretation of the human face. The perfectly white finish of the piece matches our sand and is a wonderful (though by no means mandatory) complement to the architecture of Alys.”
“In addition, we love how Steve has tied the piece to Alys Beach and the park by naming her Leda, a contraction of the park name, and referencing the presence of the Gulf by way of her scalloped mermaid’s hair and the shaping of the ‘wave’ yaupon hedge out of which she emerges.”
Arboleda, which means "grove of trees" in Spanish, was inspired by the mixture of formal and informal plantings that comprise the park.
