Vermont floods washed away a work of art in the Winooski River — but its sculptor still holds hope

image courtesy of Frankie Nanni, taken 7/11/23

In 2013, when he installed the metal figure he had sculpted, Tyler Vendituoli imagined the first winter it would see holding its pose in the Winooski River. Back then, the water came up to his knees. He could picture a tree coming down the river, dislodging the statue from its still stretch. He was always surprised, over the years, that it had remained for so long. 

The statue of a woman in balancing yoga flow situated on a low wall in the Winooski River — named “Natarajasana,” the Hindi word for her pose — was washed away during the surge early last week. As catastrophic flooding engulfed their neighbors in towns across the state, the relatively safe residents of Winooski might’ve eyed the remarkable force of the rushing river, flush with rain. 

And though most of the effects of the rainfall were contained to the river’s floodplains, the disappearance of the artwork marked a visible loss to the cityscape. 

Venditouoli, a Vergennes resident when he sculpted the figure, recalls how last summer, one of the statue’s knees buckled and the artist was called in to repair it. “I put a three-quarter-inch stainless rod into the leg as a support … I think about that now, that it was still able to break,” he said. 

A stainless steel plate bolted “Natarajasana” to the concrete platform, “but the whole foot is gone,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s just the force of the water or if there was a tree or something that knocked into it, but it really got swept away.” 

The metal piece took inspiration from an era when “it seemed like at the time that everyone that I knew was into yoga, the practice of it, the importance of it, the flexibility and strength.” 

Old forks, spoons and knives come together to form her figure, which until two weeks ago, reached out for her back leg as the Winooski River extended from behind her seemingly unflinching focus. 

It was built over the course of months on nights and weekends while Venditoiuli was working another job. The initial forks and knives came from a collection of pieces he had smuggled from his high school. “I graduated high school in 2005, so I guess I’d been carrying that box for eight years.” 

Venditouli said the cutlery comes from meditation on the connection between “what you eat and how you’re doing.” So when he heard about interest from Trevor Sullivan, owner of Pingala Cafe neighboring Laughing River Yoga, it seemed like an exciting fit. Sullivan purchased “Natarajasana” with help from a Kickstarter campaign. Both businesses operate out of Chace Mill, a converted business space on the Burlington bank of the river that overlooks the statue. 

As for the decision to mount the piece in the river, Venditoili said the new owner “asked all the (officials from the) city and municipality and electric company and whoever they could find if it was okay, and nobody had an opinion, so we got to install it out there.” 

Venditoli said he could walk across the river back then.

“I strung up a climbing rope across the river so I could bring the power cord (for tools) across without it getting wet and climbed up there and bolted it up,” he said.

Vendituoli said he spent a few hours on Sunday searching the river after reports of a spotting but to no avail. 

“I hope that it is found and it’s in a condition that’s reparable because I would love to see it back there,” he said. “But I don’t know.”

In the years since the installation, Venditioli, 36, moved permanently to Copenhagen with his wife, but he comes back to Vermont for stretches of weeks to work on ongoing projects. And in the bigger picture, he said he’ll be back in town in 2026 to work on a pedestrian bridge for the city of Burlington. 

Reached over email, Devin Russell of Laughing River Yoga confirmed there have not been any updates on the recovery of “Natarajasana.” But as the future of the artwork is still in question, the artist who made it said its decade of posture has been something worthy of gratitude.

“I saw the news articles or whatever, and they were calling it ‘iconic,’ and I had no idea that people cared about it or saw it or thought about it,” he said. “So that was a big surprise and that makes me want to find it and fix it and put it back. It’s really nice hearing that people care about something that I made.”