SuppliedIt was a regular Sunday morning for Maple House residents until they woke up to a nine-foot llama-esque statue staring at their front door.
Students might recognize Cervos Spöke (“cervos” meaning “deer” in Latin and “spöke” meaning “ghost” in Swedish) as the nine-foot sculpture that lives under the Fine Arts Building’s (FAB) southern overhang. The sculpture, a creation of fourth-year fine arts student Taryn Helms, was moved by an unknown party to the front stairs of Maple House in East Campus Village on the night of Saturday, November 19.
The sculpture was not weatherproofed and Helms said it will cost several hundred dollars and a lot of time to fix damages incurred from being moved and exposed to water.
“Because it was carried in such a manner some of the internal welds might have broken and since the plaster was soft and porous a lot of it cracked off,” she said. “There’s a lot of damage to the fur, the horns on the head have broken off, so quite a bit needs to be done to bring it back to where it was.”
When Helms arrived at East Campus Village, the police were already on site. She assessed the damages and moved the statue back to her studio with help from a friend and some officers who were investigating the occurrence. Officers had questioned Maple House residents if they’d seen anyone move the sculpture.
Helms opened files with University of Alberta Protective Services (UAPS) and Edmonton Police Service (EPS), who told her they were asking around about the incident and trying to find surveillance footage. Initially, UAPS and EPS said they had no record of responding to the deer-disturbance when asked by The Gateway. When provided with the case numbers, UAPS and EPS still did not provide any information.
The cost of repairing Cervos Spöke will fall on Helms if she’s unable to find the culprit and see if they will cover the damages.
“It’s just very unfortunate that it was taken without asking,” she said. “I feel like if people wanted to display it and come talk to me it would have been better. To have kept it outside like that was detrimental to the piece. “
The piece was a project from one of Helms’ 500-level sculpture classes last year and was too large to keep inside her studio. She had been inspired by Swedish folklore to use a pelvic bone as a skull. She then chose the large-scale figure of a deer to be imposing, but not predatory.
“I wanted it to be silent and something that you could feel like you can get close to but at the same time have a bit of apprehension,” she said. “I went with a deer which is still a large creature, you wouldn’t necessarily want to walk up to a deer and pet it, but you’d have that inclination that it’s okay to get close, that it’s not going to hurt you.”
Cervos Spöke will not be returning to its spot outside of the FAB, but it may have found a permanent home in the atrium of an office building in Calgary that would be accessible to the public.
“Part of me is really happy that people wanted to engage with it. I can’t really overstate that enough,” she said. “It’s very appealing to me that people have enjoyed it enough to garner this type of attention.”
Update: Surveillance footage has been reviewed by police but images of the perpetrator(s) were too grainy, the police have no suspects at this time.
