Sculpting with Fire

The small brick building that sits behind Mason Library usually looks quite innocuous. But pass by its windows at the right time of day and you’ll see sparks flying and smell molten metal as the sculpture class gets down to business, using extreme heat to create works of art.

Associate Professor Lynn Richardson teaches Sculpture I at Keene State. Following a few introductory projects, she gets right down to teaching her classes the art of welding as part of their sculpting repertoire. For students, the idea can be intimidating. “They get very scared when it starts coming up,” says Richardson, who received the 2015 Faculty Distinction in Research and Scholarship Award. “And half of them say, ‘I do not want to weld; I have no interest in welding. It’s scary and I don’t want to do it.”

The fear of welding is well placed, as the process includes using machinery that heats to an excess of 3,000 degrees Celsius and requires a substantial amount of protective equipment to operate safely.

“The fear isn’t so much getting burned. It has a loud sound to it and sparks and smoke that happen, so I think everybody is timid about that. But as soon as they realize that the heat is centralized in that one little area that you’re welding, it’s not so scary. It’s really hard to burn yourself. Everybody is wearing full safety equipment, big leather gloves, proper footwear,” says Richardson, describing her students’ transition from fear to excitement. “It’s a great part of the day, to see them all of a sudden turn around and be like, ‘This is my favorite thing in the whole world.’”

And with the excitement and new skills comes the powerful realization that fabricating or sculpting anything is possible. “I teach my first-year students to weld, and it tends to be a lot more women than men,” she says. “About two semesters ago, one of the students was welding and she just looked at me and said, ‘I feel so empowered now!’”

Richardson understands the feeling.

“When I say it’s empowering, it’s not just about the gender role and having this skill that a male has, but when I look around wherever I am, everything is constructed in our environment – and that’s probably why I’m a sculptor, because the world I see is in three dimensions. As soon as you learn to weld, how to chop steel, and how to join things, you can essentially build anything that you want,” she says. “For our students, I think all of these things around us are mysterious, but we’ve broken it down and stripped the mystery away, and they can start constructing from the ground up.”

Learning something new is always difficult, and using fire to create artwork takes nerves of steel, but Richardson removes that barrier to entry with her sculpture class.

A working artist herself, she’s not hard to spot. Just keep an eye out for the professor with the slightly singed helmet-head hanging out at the sculpture studio behind the library. “The top of my hair is usually incredibly fuzzy from wearing the welding helmets and from the flying embers,” she says.