Drive by the Enrichment Center and only two things come into view: a building and a parking lot.
Sue Kneppelt sees this lack of compelling visuals as an opportunity for the center's clients to help create more public art for Winston-Salem, specifically a sculpture garden on a plot of grass by the center at 1006 S. Marshall St.
"As you can imagine, we are excited about this," Kneppelt said in an e-mail about a project that she has been supervising for several months. "Not only will the sculptures be created by artists with disabilities, but, to our knowledge, it will be the first new piece of public art in the Gateway area."
The center, where Kneppelt is the director of marketing and of the Gateway Gallery, engages people with disabilities in a variety of artistic enterprises.
When the garden is unveiled on Sept. 25, it will feature three cast-metal sculptures placed amid plants and four brick walkways leading up to a seating area. The sculptures each will consist of about 18 "things that fly," which center clients sketched and carved out of Styrofoam, working under the tutelage of area sculptors during a three-month residency at the center.
The sculptors, all from the Chicken Hills Foundry in Rural Hall, include Duncan Lewis, John Martin and Derrick Monk. They have worked with six center clients: Valarie Williams, Paul Quinn, Mindy Kistler, Trip Collins, Meredith Lamy and Jonathan Lindsay.
The sculptors' residency ended Thursday, leaving behind such items as birds, bats, bees, helicopters and planes. Lewis, Martin and Monk will now convert these Styrofoam objects into metal ones and weld them together into the garden's three sculptures.
"Really, it's their piece," Lewis said. "We're just the facilitators."
Kneppelt said that the sculptures will be exhibited in the garden for a year; after that, they'll be moved to another location and replaced, on a rotating basis, with pieces by other area sculptors.
"We're an arts program," Kneppelt said. "Because we had done this metal-casting workshop -- and it had turned out really well -- we decided (the first garden exhibition) would be our artists. This is pretty unusual for artists with disabilities to have public art."
Kneppelt said that the involvement of center clients in future sculpture gardens would depend on the center securing grants for another workshop led by professional artists.
The sculpture garden could not have happened without the sculptors' expertise and equipment. It will become a reality because of grants from several organizations, including the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County, which has been promoting public art; the Winston-Salem Foundation; and the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. Kneppelt said that the grants came to nearly $35,000, money that will pay for not only the sculptures but also the garden, which was not part of the center's original plan.
"It's gotten bigger than we ever thought it would be," Martin said.
As a recent session with the sculptors revealed, the center's clients have gained an appreciation for the process that goes into creating a sculpture. Several of them sat around a table piled with large animal books that Duncan had brought along.
The clients sketched out something on paper, then did roughly the same thing on a piece of foam. After that, they crowded into a small room and took turns carving out figures not with a knife but with a hot wire strung out horizontally between two poles.
In some instances, items such as airplanes consist of three foam parts held together with toothpicks and glue.
After a foam object emerges -- and clients will see this during a field trip -- it is taken to the foundry, packed in sand and attached to a kind of foam channel into which molten metal is poured.
"The metal is replacing the foam," Martin said, describing what happens when the metal runs into the foam. "The foam burns up, and the metal takes its place."
Martin said he first learned of this technique, called "direct-replacement foam," 30 years ago while learning to make sculpture at a community college. It works great -- as long as the artist remembers to remove a stray toothpick or two from the finished product.
"Every now and then you see aluminum toothpicks," he said. "You just have to grind them off."
■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at kkeuffel@wsjournal.com.
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