Richard Morgan Insomnia led Richard Morgan to his first ArtPrize. Morgan, a professional welder and graduate of the Hobart Institute of Welding Technology, Troy, Ohio, is an AWS member and he has been a Certified Welding Inspector (CWI) for 15 years. Three years ago, Morgan began making welded art. On nights he couldn’t sleep, Morgan would go out to his shop and begin experimenting with making welded bells and other gifts. He lives in Wauseon, Ohio, and is recently retired from Tronair, a fabricator of aircraft ground service equipment, where he worked for 36 years. Morgan’s ArtPrize piece, titled Hanging in the Balance, has a bit of everything in it. He made the tips from a machine that grinds asphalt, a chain from a bulldozer holds the bird’s nest, a ten-ton jack for lifting airplanes provided the stand, and various farm pieces were mined for accents. To create Hanging in the Balance, Morgan primarily used gas metal arc welding (GMAW) with metal cored wire. He prefers GMAW because it is faster and cleaner than shielded metal arc welding (SMAW). For GMAW, Morgan uses straight CO2 shielding gas, except when he uses metal cored wire, then it’s 92% CO2-8% Ar. 2015 was Morgan’s first ArtPrize, and he said he was already planning for 2016. He entered his piece in the Three-Dimensional (3D) category, and exhibited it in Calder Plaza, near Grand Rapids’ bright-red Alexander Calder sculpture — Fig. 2. Although Morgan doesn’t plan his pieces, preferring to jump in and ‘just weld,’ he said Hanging in the Balance reminded him of the solar system. When asked what inspires him, Morgan’s wife of 35 years chimed in, “Me, of course!” Beside his wife, he finds his inspiration hard to explain. He said he sees pieces and combines them with other parts, rearranging until it feels right. Morgan did say that he bounces ideas off of his son-in-law and a friend. Mostly, Morgan is a collector, a scrapper, and a repurposer. He is a regular at the local scrap yard, and people give him old stained glass windows and other farm materials they are done with. Before our interview, Morgan met with a woman who had bought one of his mirrors. After paying, she left him with a rusty old sleigh harness to use as he found fit. Morgan also makes bells, fences, totem poles, crosses, and GTA welded jewelry with his grandchildren. He hopes to keep making welded art as long as he can. You can get in touch with Morgan and commission work at richardalan studios.com. Ann Gildner Ann Gildner was working as a museum curator and one day she hit traffic one too many times. As she tells it, she threw her nylons out the window and moved north to Cheboygan, Mich., where she opened The Coop, a flower shop. Gildner is a trained artist. She has worked with pottery, clay, and painting, but in 2008, she became interested in making public sculptures because of the heightened exposure outdoor art enjoys. Gildner liked the idea that, even though public art was expensive to make, it could be therapeutic for viewers who slow down their busy days and relax while enjoying the art. To make public art, she decided to take a welding class and she hasn’t looked back since. Gildner is interested in how to make metal and steel flow. Her process, because of her art background, involves building a maquette, or small scale model, of the sculpture she wants to fabricate. 38 WELDING JOURNAL / MARCH 2016 Fig. 2 — Richard Morgan entered ArtPrize for the first time with Hanging in the Balance, which was fabricated out of repurposed materials and displayed in Calder Plaza.
Welding Journal | March 2016
To see the actual publication please follow the link above