Artist Builds City From Scraps

From a distance on Audubon Street, it looks like a city has sprung up inside the gallery space of Creative Arts Workshop, stretching far back into the building. Come a little closer, though, and you see that the buildings are rusted, almost derelict, the windows empty. Go inside the gallery and explore, and you come across the small outline of a person, lying there as if outlined in chalk. There’s a small tablet close by, but its screen glows only a blank blue.

Where are all the other inhabitants? What happened to them?

The fascinatingly lonely cityspace is called ​“First Wave,” an installation by sculptor Edwin Salmon running now at Creative Arts Workshop until the end of the month.

For Salmon, the piece was about coming to terms with the events of the past few years, and maybe even doing something about the future.

“It all started with the piece with the red X in it, and the city grew up around that piece,” said Salmon. In addition to being an artist, for over 20 years he has run EWS 3‑D, a metal fabrication business located in East Haven. His shop has made everything from signs and railings, doors and windows, to entire storefronts and art pieces. Some of his most visible metalwork has been for Camacho Garage and Shell and Bones, Barcelona and Salon Karma. But in downtown New Haven, he said, ​“almost every single block has some of my work in it. It has supported me and my family.” He also made the lighthouse-like humanist sculpture for the New Haven Green in 2016, and has pieces in Madison’s sculpture mile, at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, and in two sculpture gardens in Hartford.

The material for many of the pieces Salmon’s shop makes are first punched out of large sheets of steel — 10 feet by 5 feet, or 4 feet by 8 feet. As Salmon doesn’t like to waste material, he tries to use every inch of each sheet. But that inevitably leads to large pieces of metal with various shapes cut out of them. ​“They’re artifacts of our consumption. It’s scrap,” Salmon said. ​“All my employees see it as scrap, and they make fun of me that I collect it.” But ​“we make a lot of stuff, and I see potential in all the scrap, and it’s hard for me to throw it all away.”

The immediate association with a cityscape is intentional; Salmon was thinking specifically of conjuring New York City, which was the initial epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. ​“The red X — it’s a little heavy handed, but it symbolized restaurants closing, everyone losing their jobs.” As news of the outbreak spread, ​“we were focused on what was going on, and we were all scared and alone. The white outline — people were dying alone in their apartments,” Salmon said. ​“The blue screen — my kids were doing Zoom, everyone was doing Zoom.” Putting together the three colors, red, white and blue, allowed Salmon to evoke ​“the way Trump politicized everything.”

The piece came together in Salmon’s head simply by virtue of looking at the pile of scrap metal he had in his shop; the individual pieces aren’t altered in any way from when they were discarded. ​“This stuff is really dirty if you touch it. It’s kind of in its natural state,” Salmon said. He set the installation up in his backyard in the snow last winter to see if it would work. It was promising, but he knew ​“the piece really had to get in a gallery to have the impact I wanted it to have.”

Specifically, ​“I wanted that look of fear and pain and loneliness,” he said, the mood that prevailed at the beginning of the pandemic. Family members being isolated together was hard enough, he said; ​“a lot of my single friends have really had a difficult time with this. It’s dystopian.” It’s fitting, then, that the first piece — the one with the red X, the figure, and the blue screen — ​“doesn’t has any hope to it,” he said. But In the time between when he set up the pieces of scrap metal in his yard and when he installed them in CAW’s gallery, ​“the piece become about something else — it grew so much. I think we have hope now.”

Salmon pitched the show to Creative Arts Workshop a few months ago. ​“I believe in their mission,” he said. ​“Where else are people going to go to make stuff, and to be taught, and to have the facilities?” He had taught sculpture there himself in the 1990s and recently had begun doing so again. ​“A lot of times I looked at the gallery and wondered what I would do with it. Those big white walls were like elephants in the room.” CAW liked the idea of his installation, which went in last week.

For Salmon the process was of installation was straightforward. ​“When I installed the show, it only took me a few hours because I already saw it in my head a few times,” he said. He began by organizing the scrap metal by height, arranging them in the gallery space so that the taller ones were closer to the window and the smaller ones further, creating more of a depth of field. ​“I wanted it to look like it was solid buildings all the way across, and that there was dimension to it,” Salmon said. ​“When you’re walking by the window, parts would appear and disappear.” Meanwhile, the white blocks in the gallery space ​“became neighborhoods.”

“It’s a dark piece,” Salmon said, ​“a piece just for me, and the only venue it could be in is Creative Arts Workshop, where they’re not looking for a sale. You’re making something just to express yourself.” But there was catharsis for him in making it, and — he hopes — catharsis in viewing it.

“It feels good to get something off our shoulders,” Salmon said. ​“I did it to process Covid, our collective trauma. We all have PTSD from this and it’s still going on. That’s why I think this show is still relevant. We’re still going through it.”

In reusing the pieces of scrap metal, Salmon is addressing another concern. ​“I’m an environmentalist, so it’s why I wanted to use all these leftover pieces, and reimagine them.” As a sculptor, he makes many of his pieces from scraps left over from his shop. ​“It’s hard for me to throw anything away because I see so much potential in it. At least half the pieces I made this year were made from scrap. I challenged myself to make something out of it without cutting anything off.”

Salmon came to working in a metal shop by being a sculptor first, following, in a way, in the footsteps of his parents. His father was an architect who specialized in historic preservation. His mother was a painter. ​“So I was around the arts a lot,” he said. He studied sculpture in art school; getting into metalworking was ​“the path of least resistance” after that, he said. ​“I’m a maker,” and ​“I think metal stuff is so cool. That’s why I got into the business.”

But he also understands the scrap as ​“a product of our consumption,” and he’s been thinking more and more about the carbon footprint he’s leaving. ​“I really don’t want to contribute to global warming any more. I want to at least be carbon neutral,” he said. For that reason he has started a wind turbine business called VAWTshop (VAWT stands for vertical access wind turbine). Making the wind turbines, he said, ​“is the easy part. Zoning will be tough. But it’s a mandate. So is the art. How do you survive without doing it? You have to. You muscle through and make stuff.”

“First Wave” runs at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., through the end of the month. Visit CAW’s website for hours and more information.