My friend Michelle has been an artist her entire life, but she hasn’t always stuck with the same medium.
While she prefers handcrafted visual art these nights, she was a budding young musician plus poet in school. She just happened to be brilliant at ceramics after sculpting with clay in her early childhood with her parents plus siblings. I encouraged her to take a sculpting class in school because I assumed it would involve clay, however the professor tried to approach every other possible medium through which 1 could make sculptures beyond the traditional ceramic clay that all the people are already exposed to. First it was cardboard, which Michelle took to right away to our utter bewilderment plus surprise. She loved the method of repurposing old cardboard that would otherwise end up in the landfill after foraging behind industrial buildings on the other end of town. However, it was metal sculpting that inspired Michelle more than anything else. The professor had coils of highly stretchy, galvanized steel rebar tie wire plus wire ties to use for making things as trivial as pop tables plus as wild as abstract sculptures. One of our friends used the rebar bent into geometrical shapes that she would weld together, making these giant multi-sided forms that resembled dodecahedrons. Michelle used the skills to open a furniture crafting supplier using primarily rebar tie wire of multiple kinds plus sizes, between 14 gauge plus 18 gauge. Most of her furniture is made with stainless steel rebar tie wire because of its long term stability. She also uses galvanized steel rebar tie wire & the stainless steel rebar tie wire.