FIRST PERSON | Ocean Floor armchair wows underwater explorers | CBC News

There are many places you might expect to see an armchair: Twenty feet under water at St. Margaret’s Bay in Nova Scotia is not one of them.

And yet there it was: a miniature stone chair casually placed on the sandy seabed like a water throne.

I wasn’t alone in my confusion: a passing fish, a Red Sea raven, also stopped to inspect the strange sight. I took a picture and shared it with friends. Everyone in the diving community wanted to know where the chair was and who put it there.

I was one of the first divers to find the chair, which turned out to be the work of artist Barbara Anne MacKintosh.

She created the sculpture as part of her coursework at NSCAD University in Halifax. It was hewn from a single block of limestone, a project that took around 150 hours of work to complete. She modeled it on a doll chair she found in Value Village. It weighs about 36 kilograms and is about one meter high.

“I like the idea of ​​doing something that has such a specific purpose but couldn’t fulfill that purpose because of its size,” she said. “So just a superfluous little item, but I found it pretty weird.”

MacKintosh didn’t create the chair with the intention of sinking it. This idea came after she graduated in 2019. MacKintosh moved back to Alberta and assuming the presidency did not seem practical.

“Because of the weight, I knew it was going to be very expensive,” she said. “It was definitely over 80 pounds. I could barely carry it.”

Then MacKintosh thought of her friends at the Halifax Freediving Club. She was one of the first freedivers in Nova Scotia.

It’s a sport where you dive on a single breath. Experienced divers can stay underwater for several minutes.

The freedivers were enthusiastic about MacKintosh’s suggestion that the chair be submerged as an underwater sculpture.

The freediving community is strengthening

Club member Tara Lapointe recalls the first image she saw of the chair, which arrived without any sense of scale.

“I envisioned this giant, life-size lounge chair. And then I just thought, how do we manage to get that into the sea? And then I thought how tiny it was, and I just thought that was hilarious.”

Although the chair is small – about a meter high – it is heavy. It took four freedivers and an air-filled float to move the sculpture to its new home near Paddy’s Head in March.

“We wanted it to be in an area where divers are common,” Lapointe said. “And when we felt we had the right area and our hands were numb enough, we decided to implant it.”

The chair is not far from a cluster of concrete reef balls that were put up almost 20 years ago in hopes of encouraging lobster settlement. It wasn’t a huge hit as a lobster habitat, but it’s a popular underwater destination for divers.

The reef balls are covered in seaweed as the ocean slowly takes control. The stool has only been in the water for a few months, but already organisms are starting to grow on it.

living art

MacKintosh has yet to see her chair underwater, but she’s thrilled that nature is already claiming it.

“An armchair makes you think of home. I feel like it expresses that the ocean is our home too. We have such an impact on the ocean. And we have so much responsibility to keep his health. And I just hope people see that. “

Lapointe agrees. She believes the chair will encourage people to explore the underwater world. “It will be a living work of art. From something inert and just stone it will hopefully come to life over the years.”

Both MacKintosh and Lapointe hope the tiny chair will inspire the creation of something much bigger: an underwater sculpture park modeled after similar parks around the world that have proven to be popular destinations for traveling divers. “It would be a wonderful addition to Nova Scotia,” said Lapointe. “We are Canada’s marine playground.”

Above all, MacKintosh wants her work to inspire joy — and connect her to a place she loves.

“I really miss Halifax a lot. With the sculpture, it feels like a little piece of me is still in Halifax. That makes me really happy.”