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Buoy was the third and final piece in a series of closely related works by Stefan Gec that took their inspiration from a quantity of metal plate, which the artist salvaged from eight decommissioned Soviet submarines that were being broken up for scrap on Tyneside in the early 1990s.
The project was inaugurated in 1996 with a recasting of the steel from the two earlier pieces into ballast for an officially recognised marine buoy. Over a three-year period, this was moved to several locations around the European coastline, during which its position was monitored by the School of Geography at the University of Oxford.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 the Continent opened up again across all its parts. Gec marked this momentous development by arranging for his benign metal emissary to wander unimpeded around the margins of the Old World until the end of the Millennium.
Commissioned by the Ruskin School of Art in collaboration with Locus+, Newcastle upon Tyne and Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast and supported by funding from the Arts Council of England, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast City Council, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Cleveland Arts, European Community Regional Development Fund, Hartlepool Borough Council, Henry Moore Foundation, Northern Arts and Southern Arts.
