The artwork is situated at the entrance to La Ronde, on St. Helen’s Island. It is a fountain-sculpture composed of 31 reinforced concrete sails and a central support, as well as 48 rudders, also made of reinforced concrete and placed around the circumference of the central part. The sails and rudders are set vertically and on various inclines. They all converge toward the centre, where a water jet flows. The upper part of the work is formed of oblique shapes resembling leaves and pointing in different directions.

The use and arrangement of ovoid forms, comparable to that of leaves and petals, earned this artwork the nickname Artichoke, although it is not related in anyway to the plant or organic world. In the artist’s view, it represents the elliptical curve described by Earth in its orbit around the Sun. This curve is here multiplied and “solidified” in a symbolic representation of our terrestrial world.

“Art is the giving of concrete form to what we feel and understand about the universe, as individuals and a society. The shapes thus created symbolically convey the abstract or complex realities that are revealed to us by, among other things, science.”

Orbite optique no 2 is one of three artworks created by Gladstone for the Montréal World Fair in 1967. For the event, the organizers gathered on the site 50 works by sculptors who were “the most influential of the century,” as well as 100 works by Canadian sculptors.