Sculpture made of litter removed from 72-mile Lake Tahoe cleanup unveiled
SOUTH LAKE TAHOE — It's a clean-up effort that has taken nearly a year to complete. Divers in Lake Tahoe collected more than 25,000 pounds of trash, and now some of that trash has been turned into treasure.
It's a sculpture unlike any other.
"It's amazing when you work on something for so long to see it actually come to this culmination with the most incredible sculpture," said Amy Berry, the Tahoe Fund CEO. "I'm just blown away by it."
The art installation called Surfaced was unveiled Wednesday in South Lake Tahoe. On the surface, it's a beautiful 9-foot tall by 8-foot wide eagle eye-catching piece.
But its story actually begins deep below the surface of Lake Tahoe.
"We pulled out 25,281 pounds of small liter items," Colin West, the founder of Clean Up The Lake, said of the clean-up efforts.
West is a professional scuba diver. He is one of the hundreds of volunteers — which included divers, kayakers, jet skiers and boat captains — who worked tirelessly over the past 359 days to remove waste from Lake Tahoe.
It was an effort that they were hoping to complete in six months, but Mother Nature had other plans.
"Throughout the 72-mile cleanup, we were hit with the Caldor Fire, we had record snow in the month of December and were shoveling 17 feet off of jet skis and boats and breaking ice," West said.
Artists Joel Dean Stockdill and Yustina Salnikova built the sculpture which takes on the form of a bald eagle and trout.
"We are just so incredibly grateful the whole team trusted us to make this pile of litter into something incredible," Salnikova said.
"The fact that they cleaned up the lake and had this incredible inspiration to pick up all the trash from the lake, it was just the perfect match for the artistic process that we've been doing for many years together," Stockdill said.
The sculpture's base, representing a ponderosa pine, is made out of anchor chains and rope. The fish is a mosaic of sunglasses and fishing gear, and the eagle's feathers were formed using buoys and bumpers.
"All material has a story — everything we use in our everyday lives," Stockdill said. "Maybe we didn't mine that material or chop down that tree, but someone did."
While this is just a small representation of what was pulled from the blue waters of Lake Tahoe, the message couldn't be clearer.
"Taking what used to be hunks of garbage that was dripping trash juice everywhere when we were hauling it to our storage truck, and now it's pristine clean and a beautiful reminder to protect Lake Tahoe moving forward in the future," West said.
The permanent art installation will be on display at the new Tahoe Blue Event Center in South Lake Tahoe.