Burlington metal sculptor Kat Clear has another oversized work to add to her growing list of credits (the last was a 40-foot quilt for Fletcher Allen Health Care). This one’s a lobster, dubbed Libby the Langosta — the Spanish word for the critter — that’s mounted on the side of the aptly named Langosta Lounge in Asbury Park, N.J. Clear, now 30, once worked at a different eatery owned by the Lounge’s entrepreneurial proprietor, Marilyn Schlossbach, whom Clear calls “a serial restaurateur.”
A New Jersey native turned Vermonter — she graduated from the University of Vermont in 2002 — Clear maintains her ties to the Garden State, and it’s, um, clearly paying off. Her copper-colored crustacean measures 10 feet tip to tail, and 5 feet claw to claw, she says. At night it’s even more impressive; blue LED lights installed underneath the sculpture give it an ethereal outline. By day, viewers can see that Libby is a really big piece of origami, albeit in metal. Clear explains that its middle contains a bit of hand-blown glass — actually, “48 pieces of glass the light can shine through.” What’s not evident is that the angular arthropod is preggers. Well, not really, but Clear hints that a couple of offspring — call them boardwalk babies — will join Libby in the spring.
This article appears in Oct 14-20, 2009.
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