Soviet submarines will lighten the way on Irish shipping lanes

EIGHT former Soviet nuclear submarines take to Irish waters within the next week - not as hazardous scrap, but as a floating work of art.

They look like a buoy, they light like a buoy, and the desired response from viewers may be "oh boy".

In an inspired piece of environmental recycling, a British artist of Ukrainian descent has used parts of the scrapped submarines to create a navigational mark.

Called Stefan Gee after the designer, the buoy will have the distinction of being the first such mark with "no navigational significance whatsoever, when moored off Belfast Lough and Dublin Bay by the Commissioners of Irish Lights.

Instead of avoiding it as a potential hazard, passing ships are invited to view it ... and, presumably, gasp in admiration before it makes it way via a European sea tour for the submarines' home port of Murmansk.

A "swords to ploughshares project" is how the work has been described in British art critic reviews. The artist, who was born in Huddersfield and studied fine art at the University of Northumbria and the Slade School of Fine Art, says it was inspired by his background as a second generation Ukrainian. His father arrived in Britain as a refugee just after the second World War, but did not return, due to the political situation within the Soviet Union, until spring of 1995.

The eight submarines used as material symbolise a political climate that caused his father's exile, Stefan Gee explains. The steel plate was salvaged by the artist when the craft were being decommissioned in the English port of Blyth in 1989. Initially, he recast the steel into eight large bells, called Detached Bell Tower, which were attached to a high level bridge in Newcastle upon Tyne so that they would ring on the rising tide.

"The bells were appearing and disappearing, but always present, reflecting the role the material had as a submarine," Mr Gee explained. As a form of underwater communication, they were more than functional, he said - "moving into the area of myth and legend, to stories of submerged church bells that can still be heard beneath the water".

Mr Gee hopes that the buoy will be used by various harbour authorities for navigation. However, a spokesperson for the Commissioners of Irish Lights said politely they have no such plans, even though its livery is consistent with a "special mark" which denotes special navigational hazards such as sewage outfalls.

The Irish Lights tender, Granuaile, will place the buoy at sea, and moorings have been given on loan by the lighthouse authority. A local radio navigation warning will be broadcast while it floats in Belfast Lough for 12 weeks, and in Dublin Bay for another two months.

Fitted with a Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite receiver and transmitter, its position will be transmitted daily on the Internet as it moves to 10 locations over the next three years, from Ireland to Iceland, and west up the Baltic to Murmansk in the Barents Sea.

A model will also be on show onshore initially at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast from September 28th to November 30th, and at the Arthouse in Dublin early next year.

Mr Gee intends to hand it over before the end of the millennium to the Murmansk authorities ... if his baby is still afloat by then.