 Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community, a partnership for generations. Member FDIC. Welcome to Common Ground. I'm producer-director Scott Knidson. In this Season 10 premiere, join artists on the Bemidji Sculpture Walk. Also, Kathy Sanders invites us into her studio as she creates a beautiful glass bead. In Bemidji, the morning of May 20th, 2017, was cold and blustery. Evidence of snow was in the air, but that didn't stop the dedicated workers of the Bemidji Sculpture Walk. My name is Kristen Nesseth and I'm from Barron, Wisconsin. And I started welding about, man, five years ago. And it's been quite a journey learning about the medium and about the process. I work out of a small industrial manufacturing company and it's all recycled scrap steel from manufacturing. And I just started welding after work. I started working there as a safety director and I made a little dragon. And then I started making other things and suddenly I had this whole menagerie of different sculptures that I had made. And that was kind of the end of anything else that I was planning to do with my life. So since then, I guess I've done quite a few other sculpture tours. The Eau Claire sculpture tour, still water sculpture tour. And I had these pieces made up last year and wanted a place to display them for the year and got in touch with Bemidji and they were gracious enough to accept my work. I have three pieces this year. I'm really lucky. They took a metal harp sculpture that I made last year and a small seahorse sculpture as well as a horse sculpture. This is where it has to be, Harmony Food Co-op. It's beautiful. I can stand here and hear it. It's just this soothing, mellow sound that makes my soul go, ah, just like that. I'm Jim James. I'm Aiden Demere. We're sculptors and we're both teachers. We both teach in Jamesville, Minnesota. And I'm the art teacher. And I'm the welding teacher. And this is our sculpture dystopia and a lot of what you see on our sculpture came from the students at our school. The assignments that they did are the outside ring for the sculpture. Well, I think it's great for the kids even though they have small parts of the sculpture. It's still, they can still recognize it and see it. And I think it's a great learning opportunity for them. It's neat to see your work displayed, that's for sure. It's not a typical welding project that I have here. It's more of an art project and it's kind of a new way to look at things. And I'm real excited and real honored that the midget was able to choose us and have us here and have us displayed for the year. And looking forward to coming back and taking a look at it in the different seasons. It should be fun. I think it just brings an awareness to the arts. I mean, of course, it's aesthetics, which are always great for a city. But it also brings attention to the arts too. I'm Marlon Davidson. I'm an artist. I have lived in Bemidji for over 30 years. Well, I'm John Davidson and I'm from Bemidji. I grew up here and I met Marlon in college here. And we've been together ever since making art. And this year we worked through part of the winter making a tower. And after we got that tower finished, we thought maybe it would be a good thing to submit it to the sculpture walk. Marlon thought we should make a tower. And I said, okay, I'll build the base for it and you do the rest. And so that's what we did. It had to have a wide enough base with people walking around. And then we wanted it as tall as we could have it. And this was as tall as we could have it in our house because the ceilings are eight feet high. Usually, John starts with a framework. His medium is wood. He builds something. And I look at it somewhere in the middle when it's about halfway done. And that suggests ideas to me about color, about where the pieces are going to be placed, how I'll do the collage. So it's a process of him starting and then my adding to it. And an important part of it is discussion because we look at the piece as we work on it. He makes suggestions to me and I make suggestions to him. So it truly is a collaboration. My part of it is collage. And the way I make this collage is I use acid-free foam core and I paint on it and I draw on it with India ink. Then I cut it up into pieces and then I start to arrange it on the surface in a way that pleases the eye until it all comes together as a unit. And then finally after I've got it all arranged and we've looked at it and think, yeah, it's finished. Then I put a coat of matte medium on top of it so that it's sealed so that it can be cleaned. It wouldn't be good out in the rain, but a damp cloth on it is perfectly okay. And it was put into the visitor's center, which is one of the best places we could possibly have our art. Lots of people passing through to see it because that's one of the satisfying parts of making art is for people to see it, not necessarily to buy it. No, we want people to see it. So this is a good place for it and we're very grateful. We're very happy to be in the sculpture walk in Bemidji. We've been looking at the sculpture walk ever since it started, have been admiring Al Bellovo, Mitch Blessing, all the people who have put so much time into it and watched the sculptures and admire them, the idea of submitting and getting it accepted was like a challenge. And when it happened and they said, yes, we want you to be in it, it was thrilling and very satisfying. We were happy about it. I really think it's kind of a catalyst of bringing together, draws people into the community, tourists and our own residents, draws them in so that they walk around town, they look at the sculptures, but of course, along with that, they see other things. Conversation takes place and anytime the arts are the catalyst or the vehicle that draws people and gives them conversations and so on, that's a healthy thing for the community, peaceable and gives delight to the eye and just makes us a happier people. What I want to see and have seen is a rise in the quality of the work. It gets better every year. It gets better every time I see it. And this year, boy, I really think looking around at what's out there, it is a demonstration of a rise in quality. My name is Molly Wisdy and I'm a chainsaw sculptor. I am based out of Walker, Minnesota. I also teach art in Pequot Lakes, Minnesota and we're at the Bemidji Sculpture Walk and this sculpture here, the wolves, is my first sculpture in the Bemidji Sculpture Walk. I do like to make a lot of art that kind of celebrates Minnesota outdoors and the animals and culture that we have here in northern Minnesota because I love living here and that's kind of where the wolves came from. As I've created chainsaw carvings, I really love working with the natural material. I love working with the trees that are right here, trees that have died or been cut down for different reasons and the wormholes and the cracks and just everything that comes with a natural material and that kind of inspired me to work with animals from Minnesota because I love being outdoors here. I love fishing and hunting and hiking and just being in the outdoors of Minnesota and I've always loved wolves. They're very majestic and I kind of wanted to celebrate their existence. Wolves are a little controversial. Some people love them, some people hate them because they're part of our life here. And I wanted to get a lot of movement in the piece. A lot of chainsaw carvings you can tell came from one log. So to get a lot of movement in negative space, I have the wolves lifted up here but I had to make sure there was enough points of contact to support so I've got a rock underneath so they're touching at the back and in the center and then I have the two wolves dolled together to support in the middle. So it's several different pieces. The other thing I like to do is I want to make sure that there's a lot of depth to the piece so I usually use a combination of burning, staining and paint to kind of get that depth. So you can see on the base, I use like a cabbage deck stain to protect it from the weather but this dark color is also the base for the wolves and then I do some burning to get darkness in the low spots and then to pull out the highlights I dry brush acrylic paint over the top of that and then make sure that the whole thing is sealed so it holds up to the weather. I designed the sculpture first and then kind of realized the size log that I was going to need and was a little intimidated and overwhelmed at trying to find a log and there's a carver in Wisconsin, Jeff Moore that does a lot of lamination which is taking slabs of wood and gluing them together, clamping them and kind of building whatever size log you want and it actually holds up even better in the long run because when you use a full log there's always tendency for it to crack more so I talked to Jeff quite a bit and figured out the lamination process so this piece is actually, and you can see some of the lines in it I built it out of slabs so just creating the piece of wood that I was going to carve from took quite a while and was quite the process The challenges of creating with a chainsaw for me, I have an art background being an art educator and I took a lot of art courses in college I can get a pretty decent looking piece but then switching to a chainsaw and trying to get the correct anatomy and proportions and that realism with such a fast powerful tool you almost have to at first restrain it because it's really easy to cut things off that you don't intend to and you can't add it back so it can be tough to get things just how you want them so as an art teacher I've taught every grade level I was at elementary and middle school and now I'm at the high school level it has been incredible I think it's really important for art teachers to create their own art because coming back to the classroom in the fall and sharing my experiences with my students and my process creating art is complicated and it gets really intense and emotional sometimes so showing them how I plan and where I get ideas and like when I fail sharing my failures with them and my struggles and harsh critiques that I've gotten and so that they know that I'm in the same boat with them and I think it's fun to share with them art outside of the classroom and kind of what's going on in the art world once they're done with school how they can be involved so I just like to encourage students to make art a part of their life it's not going to be their career because art is an important part of who we all are I think that art really brings communities together art gives us a reason to get out and be with each other art gives us things to celebrate and with the Bemidji Sculpture Walk art is helping bring people back downtown to experience culture and visit and see places that they might not otherwise come to art really helps the community thrive and I think that's a great thing My name is Kathy Sanders and I am a bead artist I started oil painting about 40 years ago and I've been painting for a long long time about 10 years ago I joined my husband he was headed to a wood carving conference and I didn't really want a wood carve and there was a gourd artist there so I decided to take the gourd class and since then I've found them a perfect canvas to display my art I embellished my gourds with beads and as a rule I purchased commercial beads but I thought it would be a lot of fun to make my own beads and in that way I could make beads specific for each gourd that has developed into making my own jewelry line and ornamentation for utility items like wine stops, spoons, forks I create my glass beads in my workshop that my husband and I share lamp working is called lamp working because they used to use lamps today we use propane oxygen torch and that's what I use to make this bead I start with a stainless steel mandrel and it's coated with something that will allow me to take the bead off when it's completed and I use glass rods these glass rods are from Marano, Italy there are four or five places in the United States that I can purchase these rods and so pretty well all of my equipment and glass comes over the internet I take the glass rods and start to wrap the glass around the mandrel it's a very slow patient process you have to have control of the heat and the glass wants to move and you have to apply certain techniques so that the glass will go where you want it to go there aren't very many glass bead makers that don't have the scars to show where glass has popped off the end of the rod it can be really shocky some colors are more shocky than others so you have to introduce the glass rod very slowly into the heat and even then sometimes you'll get a shocky glass and little bits of glass will fall off the rod and sometimes they'll hit you so as a rule I wear longer sleeves I wear cotton and those prevent me from having a polyester type of material that would really burn a couple of other issues when I'm using enamels or my silver glass I have to use a respirator there are bad fumes that can come from the glass I have an excellent air exchange system and this pulls the air directly from the flame to the outside and away from me I also have an overhead air exchange and that pulls the air away also in the summertime I love to keep all the doors open that's really great for fresh air so there are a lot of dangers with this it's not something that is for everybody one of the first steps that any bead maker learns is how to make stringer and I pulled a number of stringers for this bead I had to pull a black stringer and I pulled an emerald green stringer and those stringers are pieces of the rod that you heat up the end and then you take a tweezer and you pull off smaller pieces so that you have a smaller rod and that's called a stringer with that stringer then I make what I call a twisty that's for the vine in the back and I use five or six different colors of glass I start with a layer of pea green I take the rod, heat up the end and I make a little paddle out of that end on that paddle now I'm going to put a nice bright yellow on one side and then I'm going to put the stringers on the other side there's the emerald green, there's some black and those colors will all combine to make a nice vine in the back when I start this bead I take a nice green transparent rod of glass and I start wrapping it around the mandrel I have my heat on a medium heat and I wrap it several times to make a nice barrel bead that's the start of the shape is a nice barrel bead the next thing I'm going to do is apply the ivy twisty that we just made a little while ago and I apply that in a random pattern I want it to look kind of like an ivy it's going to go back behind the flowers I want it to connect in different places so that the flowers look like they're connected over that ivy I'm going to put a layer of clear I want to add depth to this bead and the best way to do that is to apply a layer next to the previous layer so that sets the ivy into the background otherwise the flowers would sit directly on the ivy and you need to get that depth after I apply that layer of clear and in between each of these layers I have to heat the bead and make sure it lays flat again and I use a marver and that helps me to shape the bead after I'm done with that clear layer now I can start to apply the flowers that will lay on top of the ivy I'll decide how many petals I want you can do three, four or five petals in this instance I'm doing four petals I apply a white dot in the center and it's like with an oil painting the background does affect what comes next and in order to neutralize that background you put on a white or some neutral background so that you can develop the color on top of the next layer and so I'm putting white dots where I want the flowers to sit I'm looking at each side of the bead deciding how many flowers I want larger beads can take four or five flowers in this instance I'm putting on three flowers of four petals and so I'm looking at placement first with the white then I'm adding more white just to make sure that the dots are close to the same size one thing I like about doing florals in oil paintings and in beads is it doesn't have to be perfect each petal does not have to be exactly the same size things in nature aren't always perfect and so it's the same with the bead I try to get them similar size so it doesn't look like it doesn't make sense but if they aren't exactly the same size that's alright after I've got the white layer applied and the placement that I want on the beads then I'm going to add a nice bright orange this is called a striking color this rod looks fairly clear when you look at it but when I put it in the flame at the end of the process it will turn a nice bright orange striking colors are usually your yellows reds and oranges and what you do is you apply them and they look clear when you apply them but then when you're done applying them you waft them through the flame and that allows the color to come out in this instance a nice bright orange color will occur at the end after I put on the orange color now I'm going to put another layer of clear so that I can get some depth between that and the stamen that I'm going to add to the center I'm going to apply a stamen cane to the center that's a nice black stamen cane that I made prior to this demonstration and I'm taking the stamen cane I'm heating up the center of the flower this pulls the petals towards the center the heat is what draws the glass towards itself and that helps me also apply the cane to the center of the flower after I apply the cane to the center I just poke it directly into the center then I cut it with my rod nippers I quickly heat up the end of the stamen cane and apply a dot of clear glass so that that seals that end and I'll do that on all three of the flowers as I go along the layer of clear is on top of the stamen cane and I'm using a marver to kind of spread the cane so that the stamen opens up and the end result will be an open stamen on this flower then I'm taking a small stringer of yellow and adding small dots of flowers the final step is to apply a layer of clear over everything and this is called encasing the bead and this encases the entire bead in a nice clear color also provides depth and preserves the color I have to keep the bead warm at all times if I don't it will shock and break when I'm done with the bead I give it a nice soak of heat and then I put it in a kiln because at 960 degrees I keep it in there for about 10 hours it ramps it up to 960 degrees holds it there for a certain amount of times and then ramps down slowly and it cools down and that stabilizes the bead I've had my beads fall on the cement floor they don't break they're very durable once they're annealed these are what I consider miniature paintings or treasures I've been an oil painter for a lot of years and the old masters used to layer it's many many layers of paint that you apply to develop a painting and I think it's kind of like an oil painting there's many many layers people are surprised when they watch me demonstrate how many layers there are to make one bead a bead like this would probably take 10 to 12 layers to develop it properly in order to get the depth and the quality that you need you can see the green background that I used you can see the little bit of the white a little trace of the white, the orange and the stamen in the center it isn't like an oil painting when I can go back three months later and fix it if it doesn't turn out it goes in the water bucket these are called organic beads and the reason these are called organic beads is because sometimes you just let the glass go where it wants to go you use colors that you want to use you have that in mind before you start you have techniques that you want to use you have that in mind before you start but you also let the glass flow where it wants to go I've used some silver ivory stringer in here which is silver leaf over ivory rod of glass and when you use that in a reducing flame which has more propane it actually webs control over that webbing it kind of flows where it wants to go each bead has its own story to tell each one of them I consider little works of art or little treasures they all have their own techniques techniques are not copyrighted just put that in there techniques are not copyrighted and I do learn a lot of techniques through classes but I apply them to my own art and creative process I like to not reinvent the wheel and that's why I do take a lot of classes to learn techniques but then I apply them to the colors and the shapes and the style that is my own every time I make a bead I think oh I can make a better bead next time I'm constantly striving to make something that hasn't been made before Thanks for watching Join us again on Common Ground If you have an idea for Common Ground in North Central Minnesota email us at legacy at lptv.org or call 218-333-3014 To watch Common Ground online visit lptv.org and click local shows For episodes or segments of Common Ground call 218-333-3020 Production funding of Common Ground was made possible by First National Bank Bemidji continuing their second century of service to the community a partnership for generations member FDIC Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th 2008