Eighteen months ago, British artist Simon Starling dropped a replica of a sculpture by Henry Moore into Lake Ontario.

This weekend, visitors to the Power Plant gallery in Toronto will see the result as part of a retrospective of work by Turner Prize-winner Starling.

British artist Simon Starling poses with Shedboatshed after winning the Turner Prize in December 2005 at the Tate Britain Gallery in London.
(Mike Dunn/Associated Press)

Starling considers himself a storyteller, he told CBC cultural affairs show Q.

The work he's created in Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore) is partly the story of a Henry Moore sculpture, but also the story of the zebra mussel, an invasive species that will cover any object that sits long enough in Great Lakes water.

"What you will see is [a] copy that was made of Warrior with a Shield. It came to Toronto in 1954. The [Art Gallery of Ontario] bought the piece — and it was controversial when it arrived," Starling said.

"What we did was we made a copy of the piece and it was sort of tossed into Lake Ontario."

Moore used to tell the story of finding a pebble on the beach that reminded him of a torso with a severed limb and that was the genesis of Warrior with a Shield, Starling said.

"The idea of my project is to in a sense continue that logic and to throw that stone back into the water," Starling said.

Starling sent a diver down every six months or so to check on the progress of the zebra mussels that were gathering on the outside of the replica sculpture.

"The first few months didn't look good — there was just algae ...," he said.

But after 18 months the sculpture is richly covered.

Starling said he is fascinated with the idea of invasive species, such as zebra mussels, which were introduced in 1988 in the ballast of a freighter that originated from the Baltic. They are now considered a major problem in the Great Lakes.

"When I came here I discovered this story," he said.

Turner Prize like a 'tattoo'

Starling won the Turner Prize, a high-profile and often-controversial British prize for contemporary art, in 2005 for Shedboatshed, another piece with a story.

It was a former shed that he found in Switzerland, turned into a boat, floated down the Rhine and then rebuilt as a shed.

Winning the Turner is like "a tattoo," Starling said. "It never leaves you …[It's also] kind of empowering on one level. People take you seriously in [a]way they wouldn't have done before ... That's smoothed over a few bumps in making new projects."

Starling's now-international reputation has allowed him to speak and exhibit all over the world, including the retrospective of his work from 2002-2007 which showed in Germany before coming to Toronto.

Starling's art is often called conceptual, but he believes the stories they tell stand on their own as something readable by the average viewer.

"It's all there — the mussels can be seen," he said.

At the same time, he's happy to keep explaining the back story.

"In the end, it's better for me to tell these stories than for other people to tell them — because they get it wrong."

Cuttings (Supplement), a retrospective of work by Simon Starling, opens March 1 at the Power Plant in Toronto.