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Pattie Young, left, welds barbed wire into a horse sculpture that will reach 12 feet when it is standing up. Travis Emmen, right, of Refining Fire in New PLymouth, helps.
Pattie Young and Travis Emmen, both of New Plymouth, and Payne Chassen, of Michigan, worked together on a 12-foot rearing horse for the 2015 Mountain Home Country Music Festival. Fellow artist James Dobney, of Vale, built a 16-foot banjo to accompany the horse among flickering metal flames onstage.
Pattie Young, left, welds barbed wire into a horse sculpture that will reach 12 feet when it is standing up. Travis Emmen, right, of Refining Fire in New PLymouth, helps.
Pattie Young and Travis Emmen, both of New Plymouth, and Payne Chassen, of Michigan, worked together on a 12-foot rearing horse for the 2015 Mountain Home Country Music Festival. Fellow artist James Dobney, of Vale, built a 16-foot banjo to accompany the horse among flickering metal flames onstage.
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Not very many people can find new uses for rusty old barbed wire, but to Pattie Young, the stuff is practically solid gold.
The New Plymouth artist of Rustic Raven Designs took several reals of used barbed wire off the hands of a local farmer and, with the help of two other artists, crafted it into a 12-foot rearing horse. The horse will be on stage at the Mountain Home Country Music Festival at the end of this month.
Young specifically sought old barbed wire. The newer stuff is not as thick, she said, and it is galvanized so it does not rust as nicely with age. The zinc coating also creates a hazard for anyone working with it extensively.
Young un-barbed over a mile of wire and molded it into torrents streaming in circles to form the horse’s open-frame body. No photo could do the sculpture justice; nothing could compare to getting an up-close look at the very detailed and undoubtedly difficult work Young and her colleagues have accomplished.
Fellow artist James Dobney, of Vale, built a 16-foot banjo of varying reused materials to accompany Young’s horse. The banjo will rise out of a ring of metal flames sculpted by Young. Dazzling red lights will flicker across the metal, bringing the flames to life.
Young based her design on a small table sculpture as well as similar horse sculptures she has done in the past. Before she could get to work on it, she encountered a problem: those previous horses she made were solid designs, so they had barbed wire fully covering their bodies. They were smaller, but they still took six months to make. Young wanted to cut on manufacturing time by making this larger horse an open-frame design, so it would not be quite as solid.
The problem: a larger horse means more barbed wire, and more barbed wire means more weight. She decided in the end the weight would be too much for the horse to handle, and it could potentially crumple and create a safety hazard.
Young touched base with another New Plymouth artist, Travis Emmen, of Refining Fire LLC. She asked him to make a sturdy frame for the horse, and he had it done in just a few days.
The pieces are heavy ― the frame, alone, weighs 150 pounds. Young is a tough but slender woman, so she needed some help in putting these large pieces together. Emmen joined her in helping construct the horse, as well as her friend Payne Chassen, who flew out from Michigan for the project. They all ended up working on the horse for two-and-a-half months. Young said realistically, it should have taken four.
“I don’t know of anyone else who could have helped,” Young said. “There was no time to train anybody. I had to have someone who knew what they were doing.”
Chassen and Young apprenticed under the renowned Boise artist, Bernie Jestrabek-Hart, who has retired from metal work due to health limitations. She now focuses more on fabric material, though in the past, she created enormous sculptures of metal and barbed wire for cities, including Eagle and Caldwell, and for famous entertainers such as Kid Rock.
Jestrabek-Hart calls them frequently to check in on the horse’s progress.
“She has been living vicariously through us,” Chassen said.
The sculptures will be transported July 27 for installation in Mountain Home. People can view them at the festival from July 31 to Aug. 2.
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