Today, Gildner owns an art gallery that sits above her flower shop. She is an adjunct instructor at the Industrial Arts Institute, Onaway, Mich., and makes her large welded sculptures at a local custom steel fabricator, Moran Ironworks, where she is the artist-inresidence at Iron One Studio. Gildner took a welding course at Moran and the boss, Tom Moran, who is also an artist, allowed her to use his space and tools to work on her large-scale welded sculptures and any commissions. 2015 was Gildner’s first ArtPrize, and she entered her piece, Free Fall, in the 3D category. It was displayed outside of the Grand Rapids Public Museum, and sat on its front lawn with two other sculptures — Fig. 3. Gildner said the piece started as a study of circles, and then she sketched people into it. She decided to cast bodies in free-fall positions within the sphere. The piece is made of 3-in. pipe that she GMA welded using flux-cored wire and a shielding gas of 85% CO2 and 15% argon. She started off with a 20-ft piece of pipe that she bent and made into two sets of coils, which form the sphere. To make the bodies, she covered a model in a full-body plaster cast. She then braced the cast and welded together small slugs from stamping punches to create the steel bodies — Fig. 4. The cast broke from the heat of her welding, and she did the rest by eye. Gildner had the bodies galvanized and dipped in zinc. For some parts on the body she used SMAW. The bodies each needed 300–400 slugs, and took much longer to complete than the large coiled spheres. To learn more about Gildner and her work, visit anngildnerart.com/ironone studio. Ron Lichtenstein Lichtenstein is an old hand when it comes to ArtPrize. He has competed in four of the seven ArtPrizes, and, as a Grand Rapids local, has watched the contest evolve from its early days when the DeVos family first started funding the prize. The concept that he worked with for 2015’s ArtPrize began a few years ago with a piece called Our World Today. Using an exercise ball as a mold, Lichtenstein built a puzzle sphere using a plasma arc cutting machine to cut the pieces. Following that piece, Lichtenstein began collecting sprockets, which he later used to make clocks and Sprocket Ball, the 28-in., 28-lb piece he displayed at the B.O.B. (Big Old Building) during ArtPrize 2015 — Fig. 5. A friend is a mechanic at a local bike shop, and he saved chains and sprockets for Lichtenstein, who would then degrease and clean the sprockets, and sort them by size. Over ten months, Lichtenstein gathered the materials he would use to make Sprocket Ball. Lichtenstein said he wanted to work with sprockets because they are pretty, mechanical, and once you clean them they don’t need to be chrome plated — they can simply be welded together and cleaned with a grinder. Since sprockets have been hardened, any attempt to bend them results in the sprocket snapping. As a result, Lichtenstein’s Sprocket Ball had an angular, geometric quality after the MARCH 2016 / WELDING JOURNAL 39 Fig. 3 — Ann Gildner stands inside Free Fall, her ArtPrize Seven entry, on the front lawn of the Grand Rapids Public Museum. Fig. 4 — Ann Gildner welds stamping punch slugs to form one of the bodies of her Free Fall sculpture.
Welding Journal | March 2016
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