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Inside its hollow hemispheres, people were encouraged to send the artwork text messages. Its interior would translate the characters into a unique light and sound display.

The same default emissions kept coming out instead, Iley said.

Then, one bright spring day last year, a Genesis Centre user walked inside the five-metre-high sphere ­— as you’re supposed to do. The person started thumbing a text message into a cellphone, and then the jacket they were wearing begun feeling warm, Iley explained.

The way the sun bounced off the mirrored concave interior at that moment directed an intense, narrow ray at that visitor’s jacket. It was so intense that … sssssssssss …

“When it happened that somebody did actually have a piece of clothing singed, we thought: what the heck’s that about?” Iley said.

The visitor, uninjured, alerted Genesis Centre officials to the problem. Shortly afterwards, the city erected blue fence around Wishing Well, to keep people safeaway from an installation designed to be enjoyed from its inside.

“We started asking questions of the artist, to see what might be causing it. Obviously, it’s the sun,” the city art manager said.

“But the question is: is that going to happen just once? Is it at a certain day and time?”

For more than a year, Iley said the artist from Living Lenses has come up and tried to fix it — by pivoting the structure, hammering it, trying different finishes to dull the interior.

Nothing has worked so far. This week, officials decided to move the piece into storage while the artist tries to remedy his creation — and earn the one-quarter of the project payment the city is withholding.