The mystery of the missing orange swimmer has been solved.

A lost figure from a floating art installation in Lake Ontario at Harbour Square Park has been found, after a public appeal from Waterfront Toronto.

The temporary art exhibition SOS (Safety Orange Swimmers), created by Boston artists to draw attention to the global refugee crisis, features 25 orange figures clutching black rubber lifesavers to represent the more than 25 million refugees around the world.

It was brought to Toronto this summer and is set to return to the U.S. city this weekend. But one of the figures became loose from the group, floated towards shore and then vanished Friday morning.

Waterfront Toronto spokesperson Andrew Tumilty said a ferry worker contacted him after he went public with his plea to the Star.

“One of the ferry workers saw it was floating where it was floating this morning and he picked it up because he figured it shouldn’t be just there,” Tumilty said. One of the ferry terminal managers was googling trying to figure out who the artist was and found a Star article on the disappearance.

Staff are on their way to go pick it up, but it probably won’t go back in the water as the installation is leaving anyway.

“It was a fairly complex process, we actually enlisted the conservation authority, they helped the artists put it in in the first place,” Tumilty said.

The figure had become loose from the group Thursday night and was spotted floating close to land by a member of the public, said Tumilty. When staff from Waterfront Toronto came out Friday morning to check, all they found was flecks of orange paint on the boardwalk.

They were especially concerned, given the timing, that the exhibit might have to ship back to Boston short a swimmer.

The artists Ann Hirsch and Jeremy Angier originally displayed it in Boston’s Fort Point Channel in 2016.

Hirsch told the Star in July that the idea came about during the run-up to the U.S. election as immigration and refugees were becoming an increasing part of the public conversation.

“Looking at the body of water where the project was proposed, we really saw such a very strong connection between that body of water and the bodies of water that so many refugees are crossing and risking their lives to get to safety,” she said.

“(Orange) represents danger, peril and also the colour of a lot of life vests like the ones that we were seeing in 2016 around the beaches around the Mediterranean in those photographs that we all saw, the people landing on the shores of the Mediterranean at so many different locations.”

They have since added two figures as the number of refugees has risen globally. Each individual swimmer moves on a line connected to a tethering system that’s anchored at the bottom of the lake.

Tumilty said Waterfront Toronto was looking for something that could be installed in the lake itself and thought the swimmers were timely given Canada’s commitment to refugees worldwide.

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“We’re always seeing people taking pictures and stopping to check it out. It’s been really great to have down there and it’s just quite unfortunate that this has happened when it did,” he added.

He’s now happy that they can send the figure “back to Boston with the rest of his friends.”

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