Professional artist Melissa Gohman has been visiting the Mixed Media Arts class this quarter at SHS. She is helping students with their stacking sculptures that will be placed on the boulders in the middle of the high school’s parking lot roundabout. 

They are ceramic pieces stacked on rods, which will then be stuck into the boulders. This project should be finished in the spring. They are doing an initial firing with the electric kiln at the school, and then doing a second firing in Melissa’s personal woodburning kiln. 

The art teachers, Mrs. Boline and Mrs. Rollings, wrote a grant in order to get Ms. Gohman here and got $4,000 from SSEF, the Sartell-St. Stephen Education Foundation.  That amount covers materials and many hours of her time. She has been coming for about a month to help kids with the sculptures. Ms. Gohman and Mrs. Boline are both working on part of the sculpture, but most of the pieces will be made by students. The idea is to use the architecture and color of the building to make the pieces look like they fit in with the school. They are working with Mr. Schulte on the installation when everything is ready. 

Melissa started sculpting in 1996 and has been doing it ever since. Some of her projects are the Mahowald Project, Rivers Edge.  She’s done four at local fire stations, and she’s working on the sculpture for Sartell High School. It takes around 100-400 hours for her projects from start to end, including planning and sculpting. She gets requests to do 1-2 sculptures a year, which is all she has time for because they are so time consuming. She also teaches art at Elk River and has her own pottery studio where she likes to make smaller pieces such at tea cups and pots.