Farm living helps artist Sarah Stork discover welding

As Sarah Stork learned to weld, she discovered that she had a knack for welding sculptures of animals. Photos courtesy of Melania Tyler

In the metal fabricating business, you meet a lot of people who honed their skills while working on a farm. After all, when something breaks, like a tractor bucket, you just can’t run down to the Dollar General and buy a replacement. You have to make the repair yourself.

Then it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that others might pick up fabricating skills after they have moved to a farm. That’s how it happened for Sarah Stork, who was born and spent a majority of her childhood in Fountain Valley, Calif., until her family moved to Austin, Texas, as she was entering high school. Today she lives on a 14-acre farm with her husband, 19-year-old daughter, 13-year-old son, cows, pigs, dogs, and cats. But those welding skills also led her to a more creative place, somewhere many fabricators don’t bother to explore. As a result, she’s developed a career as a welding sculpture artist while still keeping her code welding skills sharp.

“I was inspired by my husband, who drives water wells for a living. He and his workers do a lot of welding back in the shop, repairing trailers and equipment,” Stork said. “When we moved onto our property in 2012, we needed to cut some pipe fencing to keep the cows from wandering off. I wanted to be helpful and pick up welding.”

That led her to start taking classes at Austin Community College (ACC) in 2013, where she ultimately earned her associate degree in welding technology three years later. While there, she learned about the different welding and cutting processes, as well as the codes and standard required to work as an ironworker or in a structural fabrication shop. In 2015 an ACC welding instructor asked her to be part of the school’s team at the state SkillsUSA competition, a student competition centered around skills used in the trades or technical occupations.

The instructor originally invited her to be a part of the fabrication team, but the other two male students on the team “laughed at me,” Stork said. The instructor then suggested that she try her hand at making a sculpture.

“From that point forward I became more focused on artistic metalworking than on structural fabrication,” Stork said.

That first year she used her oxywelding and gas metal arc welding skills to create a lifelike Texas longhorn bull. (No one was confusing this metal bull with a steer, Stork joked.) The effort caught the interest of the judges, who awarded Stork first place in the welding sculpture competition. Only months later Stork’s longhorn won second place at the national SkillsUSA competition.

In 2016 Stork created a sculpture of a tarpon and won first place at the national competition. This artistic path was paying off.

“Welding has given me a lot of confidence in my skills,” she said. “I really get a kick out of it when people see my work and they don’t put two and two together that I’m the artist. It’s been really rewarding.”

She continued to create sculptures of other animals, such as stingrays and turtles. In fact, she is currently working on a commissioned piece for a turtle that will join another turtle she fabricated and was later purchased by an admirer of her work. She also recently completed “Angela,” a human form with butterfly wings, one of her most challenging pieces that took more than six months to finish. Stork said forming the metal to match a person’s organic shape is time-consuming and a lot harder than just laying down a bunch of metal and then grinding it off. She sees herself doing more of this type of work as she looks to expand her studio that sits on her farm.

As she continues on her creative journey, Stork keeps up with her welding skills in more traditional ways, such as repairing trailers or making a barbecue pit. She even got around to finishing that pipe fence in the middle of a Texas summer. Stork may have discovered another outlet for her metalworking abilities, but sometimes it’s good just to keep those code welding skills sharp.

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