Sculpture makes mysterious journey from Sparks St. to a farmer's field

Kinetic Clock stood on Sparks Street, between O'Connor Street and Metcalfe Street in the heart of downtown Ottawa, for 23 years.

The sculpture was commissioned by the city in 1989 and was installed that same year. At the time, the city paid artist Andrew Stonyer $36,800 to make it. (That's about $61,000 in 2014 dollars.)

It's got a long red pole, at least four metres tall, painted bright red, with a series of triangles on the top that rotate to tell time. When another hour begins, the triangles are supposed to converge to form a rectangle.

For many years the sculpture's days were uneventful. It was damaged and repaired every now and then, people stuck posters on it, and tourists snapped photographs of it.

But in 2013 it ended up in a field in rural west Ottawa for four months, lying in the grass, surrounded by farming equipment.

Now, a preliminary estimate indicates it could cost anywhere from $45,000 to $70,000 to repair and reinstall it on Sparks Street, or potentially elsewhere.

Art removed without city's knowledge

In April 2013, "an employee of the Sparks Street Mall Authority and BIA" decided to remove the sculpture from its decades-long home without informing the city or asking for permission, the city alleges.

The city's art and heritage department — which manages Ottawa's art collection — didn't actually find out the art was missing until two months later, on June 12, 2013, when a "property owner on Sparks Street" asked what had happened to it.

The department then worked to track the piece down and it took them more than two months to do it.

On Aug. 29, 2013, staff finally found it in a field at 5955 Brownlee Rd., just north of the village of Richmond in west Ottawa, according to an emailed statement attributed to city solicitor Rick O'Connor.

'Well, that's quite a story,' artist says

Artist Andrew Stonyer is now 70 years old and lives in Gloucestershire in the U.K. The city contacted him last year to ask his permission to paint the piece a different colour and relocate it, and he says he agreed.

But he hadn't been told the whole story. After hearing it in a phone interview earlier this week, he couldn't help laughing.

"Well, that's quite a story," he says, finally.

"So often stuff will just disappear, especially if it's in another country, and you'll hear no more about it. So full marks to the city for actually getting their act together and trying to find out what had happened to it."

It's not uncommon for art that old to be misplaced or forgotten about, he says. And he didn't expect the piece to last for as long as it has.

"Organizations change," he says. "I've been commissioned by business or organizations that are no longer in existence, so what happens then?"

Sparks Street BIA says sculpture was in unsafe location

The city refuses to say which Sparks Street employee decided to take the sculpture down, though it did say that employee hired a local tree farm, specializing in tree removal, to take it down.

The sculpture was then left in a field belonging to the tree farm.

The chair of the Sparks Street BIA board, Sam Elsaadi, told CBC News the sculpture was in an unsafe spot and had been damaged by vehicles travelling along the pedestrian mall several times.

"It's never been thrown away. People talk that it's been thrown away; it's never been thrown away," Elsaadi says.

"The idea is it was unsafe, it's in the middle of the street, and as I said we used to repair the cement [posts] around it day by day, until one day it was more unsafe to keep it."

Contrary to the city's claim, Elsaadi alleges the city was informed of the removal initially. He says the tree farm was hired to take down the art because it had been doing other work on Sparks Street, and that it was put in a safe place.

The city and the Sparks Street BIA are now working together on fixing the sculpture and deciding where to put it next.