Alumna
Artist Mixes Old with New
Liz Denny ’81 poses next to her stained-glass creation
by the main door of Haven House. |
To her, any unwanted items
are potential fodder for her art—pieces of broken
glass in and around the Mill River, rusted tractor gears
from local farmers.
Elizabeth Denny ’81 specializes in taking old items
and recycling them into creative, intriguing, sometimes-quirky
works of art. Her front yard in Florence sports her sculpture
of a filing cabinet with limbs stepping across the grass.
Now, as you approach Haven
House from the Campus Center side, you can see her artwork
in the stained glass around the doorframe.
When the residence was
renovated last fall, the original glass—likely more than 120 years old—that had
framed the door broke in several places. Project architect
Peter LaPointe, of Florence, sought an artist who could incorporate
the house’s original stained glass into a new glass
frame. Denny’s name came to him at the recommendation
of her acquaintances at Snow Farm in Williamsburg, where
Denny often works on her art projects, welding pieces together.
“I’ve gained sort
of a reputation for this kind of thing, using old, broken
pieces to  make new art,” says
Denny. “I’ll work with just about anything, from
yesterday’s beer bottle to stuff that dates from the
Mill River flood in the 1870s.”
It was a fitting match
of artist and location: during her first year at Smith,
Denny lived in Haven House (“for
a few minutes,” she said) before moving to Washburn.
(She attempted to find her old room in the house while working
on the project last fall, but could not remember where it
was.)
To create the new windows at Haven House, Denny collected
pieces of the original broken glass. Using a traditional
stained-glass method employing lead channeling, solder and
putty, she arranged the cut pieces into panels, filling in
with new glass as needed. The panels were then mounted in
the doorframe by Wright Builders, the contractor for the
project.
In creating Haven’s doorframe windows, Denny was intent
on repeating the original jewel theme of other stained-glass
sections of the house, she says. “I wanted to do something
that would honor the building and the original work inside,” she
said.
It’s a typical method for Denny—mixing
the old with the new. She has used that approach in her
works for a chiropractic office in Florence, and for several
private clients, she said.
“I love doing this, making things using recycled materials,” she
said. “And I have no competition for materials. People
think I’m crazy. They say, ‘You want that stuff?’ I
can’t stand to throw things away.” |
