On the wing UMaine graduate sculpts birds of her imagination

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The sculptors’ studio at the University of Maine is a cinch to find. Go to the big parking lot behind the Union on the Orono campus and look for the one-story building with the giant nail through the roof.

That’s where a couple of big birds known as Curiosit? and Fach? – Curiosity and Anger – reside, for now.

The pair are the creations of recent UM grad Christina Rioux, who assembled the sculptures by using a welding torch on several feet of half-inch steel rod. The pieces are clearly from the Bangor woman’s imagination, but parts have their basis in nature.

Rioux spent a lot of time in her childhood leafing through books on birds, and features of some of them made quite an impression on the youngster.

“The beak is from a spoonbill, and the legs from a blue heron,” she explained of one of her sculptures. As for the wavy head feathers, the inspiration for those comes from the secretary bird, an African bird of prey.

Unlike some sculptors, Rioux doesn’t work from sketches.

“I just start from the ground up. Each bird determines it,” she said.

Rioux, who grew up in Greene and graduated from Leavitt Area High School in Turner, earned a degree in studio art from UM last year.

Her parents, William T. Rioux and Patricia Parent, both are alumni, and a brother is a student at the university. Her grandmother and great-grandmother both were painters, and Rioux exhibited her own acrylic works at the Portland Art Festival for several years.

She started college with the idea she might major in graphics, and certainly didn’t expect to focus on metalwork.

“As a child, I was actually deathly afraid of shock,” Rioux said, but she also remembers being fascinated by the fire of welding, an application that involves heating the steel or other substance until it melts or fuses together.

Now she works comfortably with the torch, wearing a protective mask as she holds the heat steady on the metal joints.

“My mother just wants me to be safe,” she acknowledged.

Rioux learned the technique from an assistant professor who came to Maine in 1997 – Cristin Millett, a metalsmith with degrees from Kent State and Arizona State universities.

The rods that shape the body of each Rioux bird are smooth and bowed, but the legs are rather rough and bumpy.

The process that forms the legs is arc welding, “basically, just laying down beads of texture,” as Rioux describes it.

“I love being completely random, just letting the metal do the work. I’m finding a style,” she said.

Though Rioux is only 24, her work already is evolving. Her birds’ head feathers weren’t always based on the secretary bird.

“For my first three birds,” she recalled, “they were based on the hairstyles of classmates,” she said with a grin.

For Rioux, the expansion of the sculptors’ studio at UM came just at the right time. With Millett’s arrival, the university began investing in more space and materials for sculpting, making available the medium through which Rioux has flourished.

It’s unusual, Millett said, for an artist to find her focus and direction at such a young age.

“She took extra classes, and she’s very disciplined,” the professor pointed out. “She really has the drive and the motivation. To have her graduate and find direction in her work is a joy.”

As for the subject of her sculpting, Rioux did grow up with birds in the house – small parrots, lovebirds, parakeets. Now, as someone who essentially works with metal bars, she won’t cage birds.

“I can’t bring myself to put them back in,” she said.

Rioux likes to see her birds outdoors, something she had the opportunity to do last summer.

One of her sculptures represented the University of Maine art department in a show titled “Scarecrows – Higher Elevations,” displayed at the College of the Atlantic’s Beech Hill Farm in Somesville.

Nearly 800 people attended the opening of the unusual exhibit. She sold a bird and obtained several commissions from the show.

Rioux likes her art to be “accessible,” she said. Children enjoy it, and, for that matter, “birds respond to it” when a sculpture is outdoors.

Her pieces are in a couple of private collections, and one sculpture was purchased for the Vose Galleries of Boston collection. One of her goals is to have a show in Boston.

But Rioux believes that before she can please any other audience, she has to please herself.

“I want to do what speaks to me,” she said, her words picking up speed as enthusiasm for her art overwhelms her.

“I just started listening to myself. What do I really want to do as an artist – whether I ever make any money from it or not? Subconsciously, the audience can feel that,” she said.

“You’re doing something that matters to you.” Any professional can hit a dry spell, she acknowledged, adding that as long as an artist stays with her passion, “you’ll never burn out.”

Rioux gives a lot of credit to Cristin Millett for the encouragement she has provided.

“I’ve had so many people believe in me for something I wasn’t sure of myself,” she said.

Rioux is taking an independent study class in sculpture at the university. Graduate school may be on her calendar a few years away.

A couple of part-time jobs help pay the bills, but make no mistake. When it comes to her art, Christina Rioux is one sculptor who intends to fly.

To contact Christina Rioux, call 990-1891; e-mail christina.rioux@umit.maine.edu; or write Captured Reflections, 51 High St., Apt. 2, Bangor 04401.