Steel sunflowers, copper chrysanthemums – sculptor converting scrap metal into floral art on Main Street

LACONIA — "Great! Parking meters!" exclaimed Elizabeth Meadows as Charlie Bullerwell of All My Life Jewelers handed her a cardboard box. "Time expired! I love it!"

A metal sculptor from Oberlin, Ohio, Meadows is spending the week in the city as an artist in residence sponsored by Melissa McCarthy of The Studio. In vacant space at 600 Main Street, once home to the Sundial Shop, she is fashioning flowers from a diverse assortment of objects — from silver plated goblets to rusted clutch plates — that she and McCarthy will donate to the city to grace appropriate public spaces.

Tall and lean with flashing eyes and a broad smile, Meadows bubbles with seemingly boundless energy. Raised in Cleveland, she said that she and her brother were labeled as "high IQ, ADHD" and placed in the "major works program" of the public school system, where they began French in second grade, pursued accelerated math and reading regimens and played music. "I played string bass, sang madrigals in a choir," she recalled, "and I still know every Christmas carol ever written." She graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts at Aix-en-Provence as well as joined the Boilermakers Union to master welding in Oakland, California and apprenticed to a blacksmith in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Meadows said that she drove to Laconia in her 2000 Subaru filled with metalworking and welding gear and topped with two rusty mattress springs and several brazing rods strapped to the roof. After arriving on Monday, she began asking people for the scrap metal to sculpt into flowers. Soon she had collected an array of car parts, license plates, mixing bowls, stove burners, silver goblets, an I-beam and much more, including a batch of leather soles and heels from LaBelle's Shoe Repair, which she had placed around a metal plate. "I went to Edward Jones, the financial advisors next door to tell them there might be some noise," she said, "and when I asked if they had any metal, they gave me their sign."

"I arrange the pieces on the floor, " Meadows explained, stepping carefully around them, "and watch them, thinking how can I make them into flowers. Then I'll set them up and play with them." Her flowers range from enameled miniatures the size of dimes to towering blossoms of various shapes made from steel, silver copper and brass. "I don't like making two of anything exactly alike," she said, "and whether it's considered high art doesn't really matter to me."

A sampling of Meadows work can be found on her website, mothermetalsculptor.com.

When she isn't prowling through scrap yards or brandishing a welding torch, Meadows helps her husband, a stonecarver, manage his business, Fairplay Stonecarvers, which has completed commissions for most of the major cathedrals in England, including Westminister Abbey and St. Paul's, teaches art to children and raising her three sons. "I've learned to sleep," she laughed. "But, when I grow up I'm going to buy a string bass. No jazz. I can't improvise," she confessed. "I'll play only classical music."

McCarthy and Meadows met at an artists' workshop in Bennington, Vermont in January. Meadows recalled "she asked me 'would you do an art residency in Laconia, New Hampshire?' and I said sure." McCarthy said that on seeing Meadows's work "I thought it was something Laconia needed. It was something that took only me to say please and some to say yes," she remarked, explaining that she covered travel expenses and some materials as well as provided a place to stay. John Moriarty, one of the partners in the development of 600 Main Street, provided space for Meadows to work along with some of his own welding equipment.

McCarthy has commissioned Meadows's creations and will donate the works to the city. "It will be public art, accessible to everyone, without having to visit an exhibition or go to a gallery," McCarthy said.

"I'm not taking any metal back home," Meadows vowed. "Especially the mattress springs."

CAPTION: Elizabeth Meadows, a metal sculptor working on Main Street as an artist in residence, displays a reliquary, fashioned of hammer and chased copper and studded with silver rivets, that holds her sons' first teeth and a dreadlocks as pair of her sculptured flowers bloom on Main Street. (Laconioa Daily Sun photo/Michael Kitch)