Paulius Musteikis
Koivunen fell in love with welding in a college art class.
The first time it happened, Erika Koivunen was doodling in her sketchbook at Victor Allen’s coffee shop on State Street. A man approached, called her a “little artist” and asked if she liked to paint and draw. She surprised him by saying she liked to weld. He told her to head up Highway 12.
The very next day, Koivunen was enjoying a drink at the Paradise Lounge, sketchbook in hand, when a different old guy, perched on the next stool, leaned over. “Oh, you’re a little artist,” he said, before telling her to head north.
She figured she’d better head up Highway 12 and see what all the old-guy fuss was about. She grabbed a classmate with a car and headed up to Dr. Evermor’s sculpture garden, about 45 minutes north of Madison, home of the Forevertron — the world’s largest scrap-metal sculpture — and a zillion less humongous metallic masterpieces. The year was 1997, and the rest is history: Inspired by Dr. Evermor (real name: Tom Avery), who became her friend and mentor, Koivunen has been welding scraps into art ever since.
If you spot a quirky sculpture made of repurposed metal in some public place on Madison’s near east side, chances are pretty good that Koivunen made it. She built the CommuniTree — the 30-foot colossus installed this summer that welcomes people into the Willy Street neighborhood from the west and the mini-version of the tree that stands in front of the Wil-Mar Neighborhood Center. The cool benches at B.B. Clarke Beach? The metal flowers in front of Madison Sourdough? The metallic sapling at Willy St. Co-op? The flock of birds on the bike path? All Koivunen. She didn’t design the gigantic birds at 211 S. Paterson — those were dreamed up by Dr. Evermor himself — but she did spend nine months helping him erect them.
It’s not just the east side. Koivunen made the garden gates at Midvale Elementary School, the 72-foot mezzanine railing at Barriques on West Washington Avenue, and dozens of smaller sculptures in and outside of private homes and businesses all over town.
So how did a nice girl from the Fox Valley end up in Madison making a living transforming decommissioned bicycle chains into fish and refrigerator doors into tables? “I would say that having three older siblings gave me this particular fondness for things that were abandoned and broken — things that nobody else wanted,” Koivunen says. As a kid, she glued shards of discarded plastic together. Now she uses metal and a blowtorch instead of plastic and glue.
Koivunen discovered welding in an art class at UW-Fox Valley, and by the time she transferred to Madison in 1995 she knew that metal had become her main medium. But the idea of working with found materials didn’t take hold until that fateful first visit to Dr. Evermor. After that, she started visiting the sculpture garden and workshop nearly every weekend. One day, she worked up the courage to ask “Doc” if she could weld a few butterflies out of some old Fiskars blades she found amid his piles of junk. He announced to the assembled congregation of friends, artists and hangers-on that “This little girl is going to weld 1,000 butterflies.” So she did — 1,018 of them, in fact. In the ensuing years, she spent countless hours welding alongside Dr. Evermor.
Scrappy birds perched alongside Access Community Health Centers.
About a dozen years ago, Koivunen decided that she would never be happy in a conventional job, so she quit her day gig at Barnes & Noble and plunged into art full time.
“I have been completely unemployable for 12 years,” she says. “I’m very bad at taking directions, so that helped push me off into my own world.”
Money? She doesn’t sweat it. “My marketing strategy is just to build stuff and go out into the world and talk to people,” she says. It seems to be working. Word of mouth keeps her busy with commissioned projects most of the time. In between, she just keeps building stuff at Acme Ironworks, the delightfully cluttered shop off South Park Street she shares with her husband, master blacksmith Aaron Howard.
It helps that the materials she works with are cheap, often free. People leave buckets of unwanted metal objects at the workshop. Budget Bicycle calls her when they have a bunch of old chains and other parts to get rid of.
It also helps to have admirers in the local business community willing to champion her work. One of those fans is Finn Berge, co-owner of the local wine/coffee chain Barriques. When he wanted somebody to design and build the enormous railing at the West Washington store, he was unimpressed by what the established welding companies had to offer.
“I was up in our mezzanine area during our construction period, and I just called Erika on a lark,” says Berge. “She said she could come up right now, and so she showed up covered with welding dust and a baseball hat on backwards on a small girl’s BMX bike.”
Since creating the railing, Koivunen has built something for each of the six Barriques locations, from small accent pieces to a large work hanging on the wall of the Monroe Street store that represents her interpretation of the coffee family tree.
Koivunen also has a champion in Lynn Lee, a fellow artist who is president of the Marquette Neighborhood Association and co-owner of Cargo Coffee and Ground Zero. Lee is on a mission to flood the east-side neighborhood with Koivunen’s work. Most recently, he spearheaded the effort to commission one of her sculptures for Willy St. Park at the corner of Williamson and Brearly.
“There’s this whole reusing of old materials that I love,” Lee says. “It’s whimsical. Often it’s taking something that’s rusted and old and giving it a new life in an unexpected way.”
Koivunen prefers not to over-analyze the process. She just wants to build stuff, and she has everything she needs on hand to keep doing it forever: “We have machines. We have materials. We have ideas.”
