Plans are in the works to decide where Nelson’s acquired Heron’s Landing sculpture will make its permanent nest.
City councillor and Cultural Development Commission member Donna Macdonald announced at last week’s city council meeting three potential locations for the sculpture.
“In general we’ve selected three potential sites in Lakeside Park,” said Macdonald. “We’ve taken photos and have Photoshopped the statue itself into place. Those will be available online and people will get the word out and give us their comments on those three locations.”
When the city decided to adopt the orphaned statue which was created by an Okanagan-based sculptor Jock Hildebrand, there was discussion of potentially selling it to a private land owner for use.
Macdonald said despite efforts to find a private location, no one was interested.
“Nelson Landing indicated that they weren’t interested at this time, and Kutenai Landing is still so up in the air, pardon the pun, the Heron can’t land there,” she said.
Heron’s Landing was commissioned by a Kelowna condominium complex, but plans fell through and Hildebrand began offering the sculpture to several municipalities.
Hildebrand offered the sculpture to the city in exchange for a tax receipt.
“There is some urgency because the owner of the statue is awaiting their charitable tax receipt,” said Macdonald.
“We have to go through the process once we’ve identified the site with the federal government to enable that receipt to be provided.
“That process is kind of lengthy and only happens at certain windows during the year, so we’re trying to move this along and at least have the location identified.”
The commission is hoping with the community’s help to have the location selected by the end of the month. Installation will begin in the spring at the earliest.
As far as the potential costs of installation, Macdonald said it’s hard to predict at this point.
“It’s kind of difficult to estimate potential costs until we have a location and can figure out what the needs are there, so at this point we don’t know what the costs might be,” she said.
“We have been in contact with the artist and we’re talking about what kinds of requirements there are like how deep it has to be and could it be in water and things like that.
“We’re gathering the information we need so once the site is decided it should be fairly straight forward to figure out how much it costs, and then we’ll figure out where we’re going to find that money.”