The sculptor Shirley Fuerst has written that her works are "poetic responses to the fragile web of life, to all I discover in the world around me." For going on 40 years, an important part of that world has been Mount Desert Island.

Fuerst has been coming to a cabin on the north shore of Echo Lake in Somesville since 1967. She and her husband, Adolph, an inventor, were lured to the area by the latterÍs parents, who raved about, among other things, the Austrian cuisine served at Echo Vista, a once-renowned restaurant on Route 102.

The Fuersts, who live in Brooklyn, New York, rented and then purchased their modest domicile from Al Vollmer. "I decided I couldn't live without swimming in Echo Lake and looking at Beech Mountain," the artist noted recently. Together with painter Robert Goodman and his wife, Sunny, who winter in Queens, they created an artist's enclave among the spruce and pine.

Maine represents more than a getaway for Fuerst. She finds inspiration for her sculptural pieces along the ocean shore, in the clouds, birds and landscape. The tonic of Down East air infuses her work with a special elan.

For those who frequent galleries in Maine, Fuerst's remarkable constructions made from color-infused Mylar may be familiar. She has shown at the Wingspread Gallery in Northeast Harbor, the Port-land Museum of Art and the Maine Art Gallery in Wiscasset, among other venues. Outside of Maine, special installations of her work have been arranged at the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Allentown Art Museum.

Last summer, Fuerst opened an island showroom, a cedar-shingled studio that blends into the woods behind her cabin. Here she can display her floating pieces while working on new creations. Built by Eric Henry of Southwest Harbor, the 25-by-20-foot space was designed to accommodate the sculptor and her creative enterprise. There is a work area where she colors and shapes the Mylar. The rest of the interior features pristine white walls, which serve as a kind of blank canvas for composing and displaying her works.

Fuerst discovered her favored medium in 1970, while searching for a method to print on transparent materials without using a press. She developed a low-tech way to color and shape the polyester plastic. In the years since then, the technique has evolved as she experiments with new materials.

Light plays a key role in these inventive sculptures, which are suspended in carefully determined in-tervals from aluminum rods (the ceilings are 14 feet high). Light passes through the translucent Mylar shapes, casting their doubles on adjacent walls. The effect is not unlike shadow puppetry. An occasional breeze adds a kinetic quality, a characteristic, which links them to the mobiles of Alexander Calder. Translucent and delicately balanced, these sculptures display the freedom, openness and linearity found in the work of the late Nancy Graves, one of Fuerst's favorite sculptors.

Jane Pearce, a collector who lives on MDI, purchased one of Fuerst's sculptures in 1998, after viewing the piece installed in the "Island Invitational" show at College of the Atlantic's Ethel H. Blum Gallery. "I love to watch it," Pearce says. "The light and colors change all the time. I also like that the fact that it's suspended, not hanging on a wall."

On a bright July afternoon, sunlight streamed through windows in the work area, by the entrance door and via four large skylights in the center of the roof. Additional illumination is provided by track lighting. Currently installed in Fuerst's studio are six pieces dating from the last four years or so. The largest of the group, titled "Dance of the Wind Spirits II," 2000, creates lively silhouettes across the long-est wall, the Mylar shapes winged, serpentine and free flowing. This piece was most recently installed in the Erol Beker Chapel of St. Peter's Lutheran Church in midtown Manhattan. The Erol Beker Chapel was designed by the great 20th century sculptor Louise Nevelson, who was raised in Rockland.

Two brand-new works consist of small flocks of stained Mylar that revolve around the fanlike shapes of gingko leaves. Another work, "Microcosm IV," from 2003, employs the shapes of circular shade pulls Fuerst found on a street in Brooklyn. Reflecting her Maine surroundings, actual strands of dried sea-weed are incorporated in an untitled pedestal piece that has a biomorphic quality.

The sculptor Shirley Fuerst has written that her works are "poetic responses to the fragile web of life, to all I discover in the world around me." For going on 40 years, an important part of that world has been Mount Desert Island.

Fuerst has been coming to a cabin on the north shore of Echo Lake in Somesville since 1967. She and her husband, Adolph, an inventor, were lured to the area by the latterÍs parents, who raved about, among other things, the Austrian cuisine served at Echo Vista, a once-renowned restaurant on Route 102.

The Fuersts, who live in Brooklyn, New York, rented and then purchased their modest domicile from Al Vollmer. "I decided I couldn't live without swimming in Echo Lake and looking at Beech Mountain," the artist noted recently. Together with painter Robert Goodman and his wife, Sunny, who winter in Queens, they created an artist's enclave among the spruce and pine.

Maine represents more than a getaway for Fuerst. She finds inspiration for her sculptural pieces along the ocean shore, in the clouds, birds and landscape. The tonic of Down East air infuses her work with a special elan.

For those who frequent galleries in Maine, Fuerst's remarkable constructions made from color-infused Mylar may be familiar. She has shown at the Wingspread Gallery in Northeast Harbor, the Port-land Museum of Art and the Maine Art Gallery in Wiscasset, among other venues. Outside of Maine, special installations of her work have been arranged at the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Allentown Art Museum.

Last summer, Fuerst opened an island showroom, a cedar-shingled studio that blends into the woods behind her cabin. Here she can display her floating pieces while working on new creations. Built by Eric Henry of Southwest Harbor, the 25-by-20-foot space was designed to accommodate the sculptor and her creative enterprise. There is a work area where she colors and shapes the Mylar. The rest of the interior features pristine white walls, which serve as a kind of blank canvas for composing and displaying her works.

Fuerst discovered her favored medium in 1970, while searching for a method to print on transparent materials without using a press. She developed a low-tech way to color and shape the polyester plastic. In the years since then, the technique has evolved as she experiments with new materials.

Light plays a key role in these inventive sculptures, which are suspended in carefully determined in-tervals from aluminum rods (the ceilings are 14 feet high). Light passes through the translucent Mylar shapes, casting their doubles on adjacent walls. The effect is not unlike shadow puppetry. An occasional breeze adds a kinetic quality, a characteristic, which links them to the mobiles of Alexander Calder. Translucent and delicately balanced, these sculptures display the freedom, openness and linearity found in the work of the late Nancy Graves, one of Fuerst's favorite sculptors.

Jane Pearce, a collector who lives on MDI, purchased one of Fuerst's sculptures in 1998, after viewing the piece installed in the "Island Invitational" show at College of the Atlantic's Ethel H. Blum Gallery. "I love to watch it," Pearce says. "The light and colors change all the time. I also like that the fact that it's suspended, not hanging on a wall."

On a bright July afternoon, sunlight streamed through windows in the work area, by the entrance door and via four large skylights in the center of the roof. Additional illumination is provided by track lighting. Currently installed in Fuerst's studio are six pieces dating from the last four years or so. The largest of the group, titled "Dance of the Wind Spirits II," 2000, creates lively silhouettes across the long-est wall, the Mylar shapes winged, serpentine and free flowing. This piece was most recently installed in the Erol Beker Chapel of St. Peter's Lutheran Church in midtown Manhattan. The Erol Beker Chapel was designed by the great 20th century sculptor Louise Nevelson, who was raised in Rockland.

Two brand-new works consist of small flocks of stained Mylar that revolve around the fanlike shapes of gingko leaves. Another work, "Microcosm IV," from 2003, employs the shapes of circular shade pulls Fuerst found on a street in Brooklyn. Reflecting her Maine surroundings, actual strands of dried sea-weed are incorporated in an untitled pedestal piece that has a biomorphic quality.

"Shirley Fuerst's new Mylar creations hang gracefully in the NEW/NOW gallery of contemporary art. Her dreamy Mylar pieces are arranged as a kind of otherworldly garden growing in the gallery .

The two largest pieces, suspended from the ceiling like mobiles, float gently on the room's air currents. Two medium-sized works reach out from their wall placements, while two small creations hang on the wall and exhibit insect-Iike characteristics.

Fuerst creates an imaginary world of subtle purple and burgundy shapes that float through Mylar clouds. The effect is calming and meditative."

"Anyone who has ever sailed or swum in the ocean will recognize this dance of light. These wonderful, transparent shapes, moving with the wind and casting their light upward and outward along the walls of the Blum, exquisiteIy recreate the experience of skimming along underwater on a sunny day with the light bending and shimmering across the ocean floor and the graceful, directed drifting of a passing school of jellyfish."

"In 1970, while searching for a means to print on transparent materials without using a press, Brooklyn-based artist Shirley Fuerst came up with a way to color and shape transparent Mylar. She went on to use her discovery to create remarkable sculptures, which have been shown at the Butler Institute of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Hudson River Museum, among other venues.

This exhibition consists of three large hanging pieces-the 'wind spirits' of the title--and a group of smaller works that suggest under water ecosystems. Anything faintly resembling a mobile will invoke the name of Alexander Calder, yet Fuerst's lighter-than-air, luminous sculptures are quite different in feeling. For example, æInside the Wind, with its many bird-like shapes made of Mylar suspended by fishing line, has an eerie quality as it shifts in unseen currents of air. The shadows thrown against the white walls of the gallery heighten this sense of a living entity. Delicately kinetic, the piece is never quite the same from moment to moment. One gets caught up in the configurations created by these shapes.

The hanging works evoke natural phenomena - mini-twisters, waterspouts, clouds - and yet they maintain an inherently abstract presence. The individual Mylar shapes are accented with color, veined, stained; a range of forms, some of them podlike, seem to fly about. There is mystery to this freeform aesthetic.

The smaller, enclosed, wall-mounted 'microcosms' in the show reflect the artist's fascination with the coastline of Maine {she has a summer studio on Mount Desert Island}. Tide Pool Dance, a Mylar and mixed-media piece that incorporates actual strands of kelp, re-creates that wonderful mix of seaborne elements one finds along the shore.

In a statement accompanying the show, Fuerst states that she seeks to suggest, through the complexity and apparent fragility of the works, 'the richness and vulnerability of the web of life in our oceans and in our air.' She succeeds admirably in this ecological mission, rendering elemental events with an intriguing artistic flair."