Sculpture shapes Spring Creek

Natalya Stanko For the CDT

SPRING MILLS — All but two summers of her life, artist Stacy Levy has watched raindrops form glassy squares on her grandmother’s porch screen in Maine.

Photos provided/Natalya Stanko

Stacy Levy, an artist from Spring Mills, has recreated a 924-square-foot stone map of the Spring Creek watershed, pictured below, at the H.O. Smith Botanical Gardens at the Penn State Arboretum this summer. This month, she heads to Japan to show the buoys on bamboo sticks project.

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These squares first challenged Levy to question how water works — and they still do.

Levy, 48, who has exhibited water-inspired art in Japan, Tampa, Fla., and Toronto, recently finished her first local project. “Ridge and Valley,” a 924-square-foot stone map of the Spring Creek watershed. Her work was installed in the H.O. Smith Botanical Gardens at the Penn State Arboretum this summer.

“My projects are answers to very simple questions that I have,” said Levy, a resident of Spring Mills for 17 years. “How much does it rain? What lives in water? Where is the moon?”

Levy hopes that the watershed map will encourage visitors to “find themselves according to waterways, not roads.”

When it rains, the sculpture flows. Engraved rivers gush with water that falls from a spout on the roof of the adjacent Outdoor Pavilion. The waterways meander around three limestone rocks that represent three ridges — Tussey, Nittany and Bald Eagle.

Levy says that she doesn’t understand “pedestal art that you can carry under your arm.” Her watershed map, costing about $100,000, is big enough to walk through and sit on.

From planning to installation, the project took nine months.

Levy started with a U.S. Geological Survey topography map, laying out the blueprints on the floor in her barn studio. Then, with the help of assistant Matt Harrison, she traced the blown-up map and stenciled the rivers and names onto Pennsylvania bluestone tiles.

Phil Hawk, a stone mason from Lemont, had used diamond tools to cut bluestone into tiles that conform to the irregularity of the mountains. Hawk and two employees, Jim Virden and Brian Cunningham, worked for 330 hours over one month to complete their part of the project.

Like squares of a wire screen filling with rain, the tiles come together to form a whole. Most of Levy’s projects use simple, small things to create something big.

Don Hamer, a State College resident who funded the watershed map, said he “fell in love” with the sculpture as soon as he saw the blueprints. “I hope that this will be the first of many more pieces of outdoor art at the arboretum,” Hamer said in an e-mail.

This summer, Levy, who usually works on five to nine projects at a time, also installed a piece in Pittsburgh. She painted and strung about 3,000 buoys radiating 100 feet out from a patch of coast in Point State Park, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio River. The buoys moved according to wind patterns and river currents.

Levy repainted and reused the same Styrofoam buoys in another temporary exhibit farther from home. In “Riverine,” Levy mounted 600 buoys on 18-foot bamboo poles in the floodplains of the Agano River, about 50 miles northwest of Tokyo. In six months, willows will be planted to replace the bamboo poles, she says.

In Tampa, Levy stuck thousands of stainless steel discs in the shape of a river to the Natural and Environmental Sciences Building at the University of South Florida. The discs tip in the breeze and sparkle like a 98- foot-long sequin.

And at the Ontario Science Center in Toronto, Levy created “Lotic Meander,” a 300-foot-long glass and granite representation of how water moves in a stream bed.

Levy has long had a close relationship with nature.

Before becoming a full-time artist, Levy worked as an urban forester for 15 years, based in Philadelphia. She transformed “abandoned Brillo pads of green into forests with rooms and hallways” in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut and Virginia.

Levy and husband Neil Carson, a Penn State professor of landscape architecture, grow native grasses, aspen, apples and truffles on their 80 acres in Spring Mills.

If Levy had more time and money, she says, she would change “Ridge and Valley” by adding a cross-sectional view of what the Spring Creek watershed used to look like.

According to Levy, the ridges are the shoulders of the mountains that used to tower over the valley. What’s missing, she said, is “the head, the mountain.”

“When I stand in the valley I am, historically, many, many feet underground. That thought creeps me out,” she said.

Just as time and erosion continue to change our landscape, Levy expects her bluestone sculpture to start eroding within a century.

“Water will eat it away,” she says, “and that’s OK.”