When driving on Interstate 89, near South Burlington, the infamous whales' tails emerge beside the highway. They are a familiar sight and it is hard to imagine the trip to St. Michael’s without them there.
The rumors fly about why the tails made their home by the highway, but their creator, Jim Sardonis knows the truth.
A ‘whale of a tail’
“The idea for them came from a dream that I had,” Sardonis says. “I was standing on the beach in my dream and I saw these two perfect whales’ tails come out of the water. When I woke up, I thought what a great sculpture this would be.”
Originally, Sardonis pictured the sculpture as a fountain, but later decided to use the ground as the basis for the ocean, which would allow people to get up close and personal with the tails.
“I wanted people to feel and see the large scale of the pieces,” he says.
Sardonis, a full-time sculptor from Randolph, Vt., says he entered the idea for the tails and became a finalist in a competition in Alaska.
“A museum was looking to put sculptures inside and outside,” he says. The whales' tails would be displayed outside the museum. He made little models of the tails from bronze, but eventually the museum decided it didn’t have enough money to fund the project.
Sardonis held onto the bronze models and was asked by a local developer if he could make them life-size.
“The fellow who commissioned them wanted me to make them out of granite,” Sardonis says. Sardonis says he made the 13-foot high sculptures in two sections, connecting them with two steel pieces below the fluke. The sculptures are made from imported African granite.
Sardonis says the developer bought a piece of property by exit four on I-89 and wanted to build a hotel complex there.
The whales’ tails were going to be the entrance to the hotel. The sculptures took him nine months to make and, in the end, were named “Reverence”.
“The sculptures stayed in Randolph for 10 years. They became a landmark. The hotel was never built, but they stayed there for all that time,” he says. “(The developer) ran into some financial difficulties and he had to sell the property.”
The developer sold the sculpture “for a reasonable price” to four business partners who were starting Technology Park in South Burlington, Sardonis says. Technology Park houses the offices of Ben & Jerry’s and Burton Snowboards, among others.
“Their intent was to create a sculpture park, where people could walk around, like the well known ones in New York,” Sardonis says. “They wanted to have park that people could enjoy, while developing the land for their own use.”
The partners approached Sardonis about having the sculpture moved from Randolph to South Burlington. “They wanted it to be visible from the interstate, so people would know there was something there,” he says.
Ken McKenzie works on business development for Technology Park. “The gentlemen that own Technology Park wanted to do things nice,” he says. He says they are into “nice art.”
“They want to create a business environment that’s a great place to be. They know people spend the bulk of their day at work and they want to make a nice work environment and a nice natural environment,” he says.
McKenzie says there are a few other pieces of sculpture on the property and they expect to add more over time. He says there’s a fitness walking trail on the property which is open to the public and people like to walk up to the tails and admire them upclose.
Sardonis says he had input in the placing of the sculptures and that the current location had to be cleared of bushes, but it was the best spot for the tails. He says they can be seen from the buildings and that they are meant to be approached on foot.
“The side facing the interstate is what I consider the back side,” he says. “If you walk up to them, they’re up high and you can see only sky-no trees or buildings. It’s how I envisioned them.”
The sculptures have been there since 1997.
Sardonis says the sculptures were vandalized in early July this summer. They were painted green and gold. He says in the process of cleaning them off, the Park did more landscaping around the area.
McKenzie says when the sculptures where vandalized, Technology Park received a lot of calls from people offering to clean them off.
Years of experience
Sardonis says he first became interested in sculpture in a class he took at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H. He says he learned the basics of wood, stone and bronze carving and went to Oberlin College in Ohio to major in art and art history.
“I like the idea of scale--of changing things. Like, taking something small and making it big,” he says. Sardonis has created a business, Natural Forms, and maintains a studio in Barre, Vt. He says he makes all kinds of sculpture and jewelry for “whoever wants it”.Sardonis has sculptures all over the country including at Yale University, New England Aquarium, Phillips Exeter, the University of Vermont and he will begin working on one for St. Michael’s, which will be his "interpretation of St. Michael out of granite.” He says an alumnus of St. Michael’s donated the funds for the sculpture.
