Like decorating a Christmas tree, Sculpture Key West ornaments the island of Key West each year with an incredible array of contemporary sculpture.

This year’s festival of 3D creativity begins with eight artists’ work at the Key West Garden Club Headquarters at West Martello Tower on Higgs Beach.

Cling wrap
From the road you can see a Jetson-style space formation stretched into the landscaping.  Up close you realize it is constructed of cellophane!  The Parisian artist, Ludwika Ogorzelec, has crafted an oversize string sculpture wrapped to the environment and weighted with garden rocks.

This is a new look at Saran Wrap (I’m not really sure that is the brand).  It bends light in fun ways and the cleverness of the design is a marvel.

Aunt Helen’s Doilies

Inside the brick fort, Weston, Florida, artist Liliana Crespi has spun crocheted spider webs in the trees.    The same traditional tablecloth patterns my Aunt Helen churned out by the trunkload in Crespi’s hands become a garden screen stretched amid the trees.  A Pineapple pattern wheel flies high, casting superb shadows.

“Flowers Don’t Grow Out of Nothing”
An Addison Walz organic installation features sprouting plants and newspaper papier mache “to expose the shortcomings of memory.”

Also on the grounds a New York artist used polyester felt to “create layered community collaboration and comments on mapping, mark making and memory.”
Sound figures in other “trumpet” pieces made from local plant materials. Video and clay and corrugated plastic express other sculptural concepts.

Porcelain Scavenger Hunt
Inside the garden club rooms, Julia Handschuh provides a porcelain scavenger hunt.  She released 100 light-as-air porcelain objects into nature at West Martello and at Fort Zachary Taylor and invites us to find them, sharing with her where they were recovered.

The Fort Zach portion of the exhibit opens March 1 with 25 installations around the beaches, Australian pine grove and the fort exterior.

In addition, 11 pieces are scattered throughout the city in pocket parks, ponds and municipal buildings.  The work will be on display until April 18.  Pick up a catalogue with easy-to-read maps and take off on your bike for a thought-provoking adventure.

The five sentinels of the Key West cemetery fall to the State
Exotic Plants policy. Because the stately Washingtonian Palms have been deemed not to have been in Florida when Columbus squidged ashore, the evangelical botanical staff rules them outlaws. (Poincianas also are not native.)

This is the same policy that threatened the Australian pines at Fort Zachary Taylor. These theories of inferior lineage are augmented by warnings that, in the case of the Australian pines, they fall over in storms — the fact that they have been there a documented 40 years or more, notwithstanding.

One of the five landmark Washingtonians has been reduced to a stump. Another is clearly feeling its age and leans as if crippled on the brink of collapse. The remaining three arboreal elders, however, oversee the generations of southernmost souls with dignity and elegance. To think they face their end at the hands of bureaucrats — que lastima!

My personal theory is no one should be allowed to cut down a tree that is older than they are.