I wanted to incorporate stainless steel scraps in my welded work. The metal yard I visit has stainless scraps, which in the past I did not collect. The shiny surface is appealing, but the material does not bend easily, is not as interesting from a form and shape criteria as the common steel scraps I have worked with for years. It was a double challenge: 1. find interesting stainless that would work into sculptures and 2. learn how to weld it. It melts away when heated, and requires pristine clean surface conditions.

I worked with a friend who wanted to compose only with stainless, so we used professional welders using MIG and TIG equipment to connect his pieces. This led me to imagine working with stainless and owning the equipment and having the skills to weld it. I started bringing stainless scraps home from the metal yard and worked to imagine how to combine them. The Material Needs Grant was the “open sesame” to explore working with this material. I signed up for TIG lessons and then bought the rig to work with.

I will not abandon my common steel work, but am now open to working with stainless as a component of a piece, or one that is entirely stainless. The reflective surface is so compelling, and it is a new “happy trick” for me. Like the glow of white in a Winslow Homer painting: dress, duck breast, shirt sleeve, cloud or wave crest, stainless mirrors the environmental while forming its own idiosyncratic surface.

My eight-year-old granddaughter visited at the end of August. She is my sculpture buddy. This year she announced she wanted to make a turtle, and went right over to the pile of stainless scraps and quickly found all the parts for Monsieur Tortu. It was a “final exam” for me to weld him, all the parts are stainless, and different grades. Sweat pouring down on that very hot day I did it, as the love of the outcome is the hook that gets me through a challenging process.

Madeleine Lord is a multidisciplinary artist who has been focusing on sculptures made of scrap metal for the last thirty years. Madeleine majored in art at Smith College, where Leonard Baskin taught print making and professor Elliot Offner stated if that if you can’t draw, you can’t make art.

Madeleine has always worked on her art. Her oeuvre includes drawing, painting, woodcut prints, monoprints, photography, and animation as well as metal sculpture. Her first public work “Revolutionary Figures” was installed at Fort Washington Park, Cambridge MA in 1987. It included four life size minutemen based on photos she took at re-enactments, and a figure of a woman representing the D.A.R. who in the late 19th century transformed the fort to a park. Other public works can be seen at the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, where a ten-foot giraffe, an ostrich and a figurative work are permanently installed in the public garden at the entrance.

In the past thirty years she has created both large public works as well as many small steel sculptures for homes or gardens. Her work has been included in the Chesterwood Contemporary Sculpture Show multiple times. In 2003 she created a 9/11 Memorial, “The Enduring American Spirit” for Whitinsville MA, and was invited to design a garden installation for the City of Chicago’s Millennium Park opening celebration in 2003. She is currently part of the Cambridge Art Association as well as the New England Sculpture Group.

Her recent work combines found scrap metal into figures, flowers and animals. She visits metal waste yards to search for ingredients, and friends leave things in her driveway. Each piece starts with gathering – looking for scraps which are interesting by themselves. How they end up is unpredictable. Finished work is the result of “choice and fit” in the words of the late John Chamberlain. Subjects appear from the scraps or from the news or even the occasional leak from personal history.

@madeleinelordmadimetal

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