Saint John Times Globe, 1996

If a local sculptor's vision comes to fruition, a Rothesay work of art will encompass those three themes.

By: Mac Trueman

Times Globe staff writer

The racing shell which nearly 125 years ago pitted Saint John's famous rowing team against Europe's finest will some day unite the city area with the Yukon, if Marlene Hilton-Moore has her way.

Ms. Hilton-Moore is setting out to sculpt a 20-foot bronze image of the Paris Crew's racing shell, which will become part of an artwork she intends to place next to the Kennebecasis River, at the border between East Riverside-Kingshurst and Renforth.

The elongated bronze boat - bridging the gap between two highly carved pink granite boulders - will portray Saint John's victorious scull and represent an ancient symbol of female fertility.

Its theme will fit with a project which this part-time sculptor professor at Ontario's Georgian College has in store for Carcross - a tiny former mining town in the southern Yukon.

There, a couple of years from now, she hopes to build a stone or concrete-block silo representing a phallus. The complementary nature of the two artworks, she says, will symbolize Canadian unity across the vastness and diversity of this nation's geography.

"If I carve this rock (In East Riverside) and I carve stone or cement or whatever will go into this silo structure in the Yukon, I have the parallels of carving," she said in an interview.

"I have the parallels within my work of always working the biological male-female elements against one another."

The boat also represents "a vessel of immortality," she said.

Presenting her proposal to some 15 civic officials and community leaders last night at the Union Club, she told them she already has a welder lined up to start fabricating the bronze boat as soon as fund-raising is completed for the $60,000 project.

If the money comes in fast enough, she will unveil the work this August, when the annual Renforth Regatta commemorates the 125th anniversary of the Paris Crew's race, she said.

The $60,000 "is probable half of what a sculpture like that would cost any organization," urged Anne Fawcett, the project manager.

Ms. Fawcett, a long-time friend of Ms. Hilton-Moore's, has been overseeing the fund-raising from her hospital bed ever since a head-on collision in mid-January.

With the right side of her body weakened by fracture to an arm and leg, she hobbled into yesterday's meeting on a walker equipped with a special arm brace. She was on a day pass from the Dr. Everett Chalmers Hospital.

For a gift of $500, donors will get their name engraved on the stone base of the sculpture, or else on nearby stones, Ms. Fawcett explained.

"Imagine the glow of the bronze every day that the sun sets," Ms. Hilton-Moore invited her audience. "That's an image it will take for hundreds of years. Rock and bronze last forever."

Councilor Walter Ball handed over his Common Council business card, showing the city crest, which Ms. Hilton-Moore promised to include with the others engraved on the artwork.

"It springs from the elements, and the history of the Paris Crew," he remarked upon viewing a model of the proposed work. "It's so apropos."

Ms. Hilton-Moore, who spent her teen-age years in East Riverside not far from the sculpture site, said she hit upon the concept for her double-sculpture project three years ago while visiting New Brunswick for a reunion of her class at the former Rothesay Regional High School.

This was when a classmate Bob Darling told her of the 27 years he had spent in the Yukon.

The chat led her to "the idea of marking the geographical cultural positions on both sides of this country," she enthused in an interview.

"What does it mean to be here? What does it mean to be there? What happens when you transfer from one place to the other? What do you take with you? What do you leave behind?