This post is an excerpt from an article that originally appeared in Ottawa Magazine Interiors 2014

By PATRICK LANGSTON

Midway along Jennifer Stead’s 160-foot water-themed sculpture, there’s an image of a boat. It’s a stylized vessel that sidesteps your efforts to determine what kind of boat it is or, depending on how long you look at it, whether it’s even a boat at all. That’s exactly what the Ottawa artist says she intended. “I wanted it as an image that wasn’t a canoe or a rowboat or anything in particular but would take you into the imaginative experience of this watery world.”

That it does. Walk along the charcoal-grey metal sculpture — called Water, it hangs down over the floor-to-ceiling windows that separate the swimming pools at the François Dupuis Recreation Centre from the rest of the building — and you’re swept away by the fish and eddies and lily pads and raindrops.

Take a virtual tour of the sculpture — and the snazzy new facility — in this gallery of photos from doublespace photography.