lakeland pbs presents common ground brought to you by the minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund and the citizens of minnesota production funding of common ground is made possible in part by first national bank bemidji continuing their second century of service to the community member fdic [Music] [Music] mmm welcome to common ground i'm producer director scott knudson in this episode brad wegscheid learns structural concrete art techniques from cindy lundin and they tour her hometown of purham minnesota i'm brad wigsheid i finished just finished this project here it's a memorial bench at old wadena park it was built as a memorial to a gentleman dwayne lund who donated a bunch of money to the park and instead of putting in your traditional metal or plastic bench they opted to do a more sculptural and stone looking item that would blend in with the park a little bit better and then just look a little bit more like part of the landscape and something more to enjoy than just to sit upon and and ponder life [Music] so miranda stone is the core the center of this sculpture and it is a recycled styrofoam and cement mixture that is poured into moles and formed into blocks of various sizes and density those boxes are relatively lightweight they weigh you know four foot block weighs 30 to 40 pounds and they are easy to sculpt you can carve them with your fingers you can carve them with power tools you can carve them with a butter knife if you want they they crumble and sculpt really nicely and then they're easy to fix together with like a spray foam adhesive and then once you have all that done then you take that soft easily malleable material and you cover it with this beautiful hard shell of sculptural cement that has a lot of fibers in it so you get all the strength of the cement and all the workability of cement but without all the weight the advantage of that system is this sculpture was built 80 or 90 in my studio the items were built in chunks and then those chunks were brought out here assembled into this final piece and then all of the seams were covered colored and then made to look like one homogenous piece the other advantage is that core material is a lot lighter and so instead of moving a 2 000 pound item i'm only moving a few hundred pounds so it has the strength and the durability of cement without all of the bulky weight and problems that is associated with that all right i'm just gonna manhandle this one so i have been doing a lot of ceramic sculpture wall sculpture indoor stuff and i have decided that i wanted to do more large public outdoor works i had a really hard time getting people convinced that ceramics can live in minnesota outdoors i think a lot of people forget that brick is ceramic and so they just think ceramic outdoors it's going to break and so i had to kind of try and switch gears in my thinking and i saw this beautiful piece in perm minnesota that was outdoors and it had a very sculptural look to it but i knew it wasn't clay and the artist i found out was cindy lundin so i then contacted her and said hey that's cool how do you do that i want to do that then she was happy to let me work with her on a piece in perth minnesota where they raced the turtles and whatnot i helped her build that piece a while back and then from there after i learned the materials and how it works then i started doing my own work which then led to this piece here and a couple other pieces that i've done now hey brad let's go look at the installation that we did last night it's a year old now it'll be interesting to see what it looks like oh yeah it looks great i love using miranna stone as a substrate because first of all it's 85 post consumer foam and what they do is they are alleviating putting hordes of foam into our landfills they grind it and add portland cement to it and you can make rock sculptures the interior of this is all miranda stone i love the flexibility you can do anything it's great good stuff to play with yep it's a great substrate for art and for sculptors especially yes it holds up really well in all environments in all climates climates that have a lot of free saw cycles like minnesota and also arizona where my studio is and where i live has intense heat and sometimes in intense heat can be just as damaging as freeze thaw cycles and the concrete and foam mixture that we used as a substrate actually works well in all environments whether you're in a rainy environment or a hot environment or an environment that gets a lot of weather this is going to hold up for public art public work like this too it's still repairable for if it gets damaged or backed into you can repair it quickly and easily it looks really good exactly at low cost yep very yeah it's wonderful what i like about using this concrete is it's really easy to texture and hand carve so this is all hand carved brad remember how many hours you spent hand carving all these branches it was fun though it is a lot of fun it's kind of addicting actually and then we have on all of the benches we have all the people that donated monies to again fund this project so everybody got some recognition so we had stencils made t lead designs made all the stencils for our benches and used the logos that were provided to us so everybody that donated got their name put on the benches so it's a great way to fund a project and and the key is having a good coordinator our coordinators were dennis happle and shirley jacobson they did a phenomenal job of getting this project off and running and they made a huge impact because right over here is where they do turtle races every wednesday and this added the audience that you need for fun we took an old shabby side of the building and created something very pleasurable if you're just driving through town you it catches your eye right away and it's really fun this is a big turtle chair so it's really fun for photo ops for kids coming into the church i love the interactivity of this piece it's really encourages you to play with it and take pictures right absolutely so i always want that interactiveness of art with the community this was to date the largest community involved project that i've done do you see all these little turtles brad yes yep we have 220 turtles well we made 220 turtles we carved turtles and molded them and then members of the community from all across the nation actually not just our community hand-painted the turtles and now people year after year after year can come to the mural and find their turtles well i know every time we're in prayer my daughter always has to stop and see her this is exactly what we wanted we want we want this inner connectedness with community members and i often get sent pictures of of people with their grandkids or their children or just the adults themselves saying hey look where i am i found my turtle and that's exactly what we want in a community project yeah well it's great yeah it does keep growing and you keep interacting with it and yeah absolutely and it's really fun because we had no stipulations we just gave each person some paint and a paintbrush and they painted the turtle however they wanted this is the very first turtle out of 220 turtles that are in this mural that was painted it was painted in my studio in tucson arizona done by my grandson what are these objects embedded in the miranda stonehenge brad i'm glad you asked the local museum gave us this railroad spike so it's one of the spikes that was used in the original railroad and the other thing that we have is we wanted to personalize the turtles a little bit so they each have their own name alfie birdie and clive with concrete we carve their names in so that you can remember who is who i always enjoy looking at all the fossils that we have in here it's really important for me to put detail in my pieces and some of the fossils are real fossils and most of the fossils in here i have molded and then poured out of concrete so some are real and some are but you can't tell the difference you won't know which ones are real fossils and which ones aren't and i can just point some out so we have shells and some fish skeletons and this is some fossils that i had purchased and they make great prints so some of them are just imprints of fossils it looks really good thank you [Music] hey brad have you heard the story about the hairy man of virgos i have not well supposedly in virgos minnesota which is about 20 miles from here there have been sasquatch or bigfoot sightings so i couldn't resist putting the harry manavergus in this mural he's a good looking guy and maybe he'll actually meet him someday if i'm lucky so what's really exciting about this piece brad is that this is waves of discovery and it's all concrete we have 18 panels of concrete there's hidden icons in this mural so if you get a list from the chamber of commerce it'll list all these little check boxes a seek and find and the icons depict things from the area like you'll be able to find a train engine because that's how this this uh town started and just a whole bunch of different things that are representative of the town one of the things on the list is a deer if you're just passing by this mural on a large scale looks good but then what i try to do in my art is have details so that when people that are passing by can say oh my gosh will you look at that there's a deer the butterflies are made out of agates the turtle backs on these little turtles are made from fusing glass and all the spots on the loon are mosaic glass and so there's all these little different elements that are put into this mural cindy did you also do the fuse glass i did yeah those are all single pieces of glass that are all fused together with a piece on the bottom and a piece on top all these different elements are embedded in here in here this is all natural rock it's mica and then it's been stained partially stained and some was left natural the way that these waves were made was just like taking my fingers and pinching like this you can see these are just my finger marks just like this to make the waves this is also some furniture that i've made this is the faux blah bench and planters so it's like super comfy it's rebar and mesh and concrete it's an art form called fobois which means false wood in french i was really fortunate to learn faux bois from a master artisan donald tucker and he has no longer teaching classes but he's an absolute master and so most of my artwork has some faux blah in it somewhere i've done other large pieces of faux bois in benches and other things and we also made the sidewalk and all of the turtles in the sidewalk brad are people that have donated to this mural and that's how the funding was done you know so the purim is beaubois and then the dragonflies are fused glass and then as we move down you can there's another turtle so you you'll walk down through this thing and you'll you'll miss stuff and then when you come back there's there's over 50 items that you can seek and find on here and um i everything from turtles there's a race car there's a telephone for arvind communications because they were significant in the development of this town there's again a plethora of different things in this mural and these are the fish that represent my family growing up there was five children in our family so i have one fish for each of us and for myself and my brothers and sisters and then the anchor is for the navy which we my husband's in the navy and my son was in the navy and his father so that's a little tribute to our military this is another portion of our mural it's the faux bois minnesota shape and right here the this glass is embedded into this star where perham minnesota is located in minnesota and this line represents the mississippi river and this of course the start of the mississippi starts in itasca which is located right here in minnesota and i marked this with a piece of petrified algae which is this rock is from minnesota there's snowflakes to represent that the coldest areas in the united states are in international falls minnesota and so we have the snowflakes carved out of the wood minnesota state flower is the lady slipper so the lady slipper is represented right here so these are all the planets in the solar system all the way down and then a little music and here is our dog the dennis hafel who organized this project and organized getting all the funding for the project this was unfortunately susie has passed now but this is a sculpture bar relief of his dog susie and of course kln from the dog food plant she has a klm dog tag where are we going now sydney brad i want to show you the ba relief that i made in the bookstore it's a large scale tree that's 12 feet high and it's made out of miranda stone the recycled material so 85 recycled foam wonderful so brad you can actually sit in here oh can i oh please oh my gosh you fit in there just perfectly okay so this is made out of the recycled material 85 recycled foam post consumer so um what it does it alleviates all this foam from going in the landfills and it makes a fabulous substrate for art and sculpture as we adhered the mirana stone to the wall with a polyurethane adhesive and then we covered it with concrete and carved it and stained it and these are molded the birds are molded the bluebirds so these are solid concrete and then they're put on our sculpture with concrete adhesive and then this is all carved also while the concrete is wet we carve all the main structure and then the letters are done with stencils so after the concrete was dry then we put the stencils on and then just with a thin coat of concrete go through the stencil let that set up a little bit rip the stencil off and then you have all these different designs that you can put in any of your sculptures well this looks really interesting city brad this is another ba relief piece and bar relief means low relief this one was done in plaster unlike the other pieces that we saw today were all concrete and because this is an interior project plaster is fine the different trees that are in this mural represents the different holes the courses are the oak and pine and maple and so those trees are depicted in this mural i like the oak leaves those were yeah they're all pre-made out of molds and then pouring them and then adhering them to the wall like in all of my artwork there's lots of hidden elements there are three faces hidden in the branches of the tree this was a memorial piece to the nelson family and so tuffy nelson's face is hidden in the branches right here [Music] matt bumgart's face is in the middle right there and then to the left is kenny nelson's face hidden in the branches can you find a butterfly in this mural i have not seen any yet okay so i'm gonna point one out there's one over there there's one right here oh there we go do you know that there are 27 butterflies in this mural to represent the 27 holes on the golf course [Music] so after i had seen cindy's work and she trained me and showed me some of her techniques with building one of a big project for her in perm then i was ready to get going in my studio and start working on my own stuff well right now i've got the base of the sculpture roughed in and i've got it glued together in sections so now i'm going to start working on the vertical part of this i'm going to take the rough miranda stone blocks and just set them up for placement then i will glue them together and then we can rough in a shape and get the rough shape of the sculpture done so that it's ready for cement that's a nice core there i'm going to add a little bit more on top and now i kind of want to taper in here so that we match my beautiful model so i'm looking around at some of the pieces i have and playing a super sized game with jenga to see what looks good in there so i think this is sticking out a little bit far but we can carve that off and i want a little bit more height on there so we'll find something to [Music] so i'm kind of liking that height wise and just kind of space wise that's a pretty good rough block stacking [Music] so i'm going to use the spray foam i'm going to spray water on these then i'm going to use the spray foam and let it set up a little bit [Music] and then i'm going to squish them and clamp them together the spray foam it's not super sticky right now but as we let it sit it'll get real tacky and then when you stick these two pieces together it'll just be like hot taffy they'll just stick together instantly and the best part about miranda stone is unlike regular stone if you totally mess up you can just always add more stuff to it [Music] if the glue sets then we can start roughing in the sculpture [Applause] okay [Music] boom don't get my huffing and puffing in the audio all right now i'm just going to put some masking tape over the seams so that when i put the first layer of cement on and spray this the cement does not get on these seams so before i put the cement on there i want to spray the miranda stone with a concrete adhesive it just lets the cement grab hold a little bit better cement has to be sprayed on before this stuff dries because it only works when it's wet so on a hot sunny day you either have to move really fast or work under a tent or something something like in a sprain area that's big enough for me to work while it's wet we are going to do the final setup and installation of our memorial bench here at old medina campground in north of stables minnesota fancy knots we're going to get set in place and get the parts all stuck together and then we'll spend the next couple days after this coloring it and making it look like something other than cement all right now we're going to set this last base piece in front and then we'll glue it together and then we'll start with the next layer of the cake here okay all right okay all right now we'll go with the next layer line it up as close as you can we don't want to wiggle this too much so gotta go back a little bit i think it seems like it okay watch out that stick doesn't hit you [Music] oh look at that let's go that way [Music] [Music] all right [Music] last piece now we'll give it a minute and then we will cement up and fiber all the seams and then we can start coloring [Music] oh that breeze is nice oh [Music] i just have to put a concrete sealer on it and then clean up the ground around it and it's done [Music] [Music] join us again on common ground if you have an idea for common ground in north central minnesota email us at legacy lptv.org or call 218-333-3014 to watch common ground online visit lptv.org and click local shows to order episodes or segments of common ground call 218-333-3020 production funding of common ground was made possible in part by first national bank bemidji continuing their second century of service to the community member fdic 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