Metal artist sculpts without welds or fasteners

Metal sculptor Gail Chavenelle once worked with sheets of paper to create sculptures but transitioned to metal flashing and finally to sheet metal. The medium changed, but the strategy didn’t. She still relies on folds and bends, using no fastening techniques. Images provided by Gail Chavenelle

Although paper can be considered a commodity product, it’s anything but a single product. Paper thicknesses and applications vary quite a bit. Copier paper is among the thinnest, at 0.004 in., and the heavy stock used for a special occasion, such as a menu for a wedding, can be as thick as 0.018 in. It might be hard to believe, but some of the metal flashing used in construction is in this range—28-ga. metal is 1/64 in., or 0.015625 in decimal, which is lighter in gauge than the upper range of card stock.

Metal sculptor Gail Chavenelle, Dubuque, Iowa, discovered this by accident.

“I love paper, and I used to make paper sculptures,” she said. The problem was durability, and something as minor as a proverbial glass of spilled milk would ruin a project. Keen to eliminate that risk without eliminating her children, she switched to metal flashing.

Shearing the Sheer

She found flashing to be very easy to work.

“It’s so thin that you can cut it with scissors,” she said. It acts quite a bit like paper, in that it requires no tools for folding or bending, and imparting a texture doesn’t take more than manual power.”

As with most capabilities, it comes with a limitation or two. Because flashing literally is as thin as some paper, welding and brazing aren’t good candidates for joining, so Chavenelle learned to fashion eye-catching, attractive projects made from single sheets. No welding, no brazing, no mechanical fasteners of any sort. It’s certainly not origami, but it shares origami’s goal: making something unique and beautiful from a single workpiece.

Through her contacts with other metal artists in her community, she was advised by a blacksmith that flashing was a little too lightweight to make good sculptures. This might have had more to do with perceptions and marketability rather than art; few customers want to part with some hard-earned cash if they perceive the product to be flimsy, even if it’s an artistic item. Heftier metal, heftier price tag.

Chavenelle took that advice, gave up the scissors, and invested in a plasma cutter. She also uses an angle grinder to clean up the edges a bit and a mallet for shaping the items. When working in any material thicker than 1/8 in. or when working in stainless steel, she outsources the cutting.

Comfortable with a variety of tools for working out designs, she uses Autodesk’s Fusion 360 CAD/CAM software when she’s not drawing on sheet metal with a felt-tip marker. In between those two extremes, she has been known to use her phone to fill in the technology gap.

Chavenelle’s figures, many of which are smooth, flowing designs, represent the gamut of possibilities—people, animals, and abstracts. The figures that represent people have no distinguishing colors or features, no discernible hair textures, or anything else that hints at an ethnicity. The lack of detail in these forms suits the times, favoring inclusion, diversity, and multiculturalism. Chavenelle works that angle with a touch of whimsy: A sculpture of a dog and a cat on her property sometimes are displayed singly, but often they appear together in a display she calls “Diversity Love.”

A former English teacher who got bit by the artist bug around age 50, Chavenelle has no formal (or informal) art background, so she’s liberal with giving credit to others, citing the guidance, support, and encouragement of many acquaintances in the local art community. She also credits a local metal supplier and fabricator that laser-cuts some of her stainless steel projects, TriState Quality Metals (Dubuque); another metal fabricator that handles some of her work, Giese Mfg. (Dubuque); and a machine shop that does her powder coating, Rauen Precision Machining Inc. (Farley, Iowa).

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