All Angels by the Sea Episcopal Church hosts reception for Artist of the Month

All Angels by the Sea Episcopal Church is doing something different with their Artist of the Month, and they have an artist who’s a bit different than what the church has seen before to kick it off with. On Nov. 4, the church will host an artist’s reception with Pamela Olin, the metalworking, steel-cutting maker of the month. 

The reception will feature Olin, a Sarasota-based artist who is part of the Women’s Contemporary Art Group and the Sarasota chapter of the National League of American Pen Women like several of All Angels’ artists. It’s the church’s first art reception, though Linn Torres wanted to carry out the idea when the church organized its New to You art sale in February 2021. From 4-5:30 p.m. on Nov. 4, Olin will be there mingling with appreciators of her 3D art. 

“I'll actually be bringing a big sculpture I have for their garden,” Olin said. “They're supplying wine, doing appetizers. We have no idea how many people to do this for. It's a little bit of a crapshoot … I have gotten some lovely feedback in general from some about how it's very different from other shows they've had there.” 

Olin is an artist across many mediums. She’s a welder in ways both artistic and practical, a designer, an event organizer and a community contributor. She works with companies to create team-building events based around a single artistic project and is currently working with SPARCC to create an installation for their property. She has been working with steel, which is what makes up a lot of her All Angels oeuvre, for about 30 years. When she was seven and a half months pregnant with her now 29-year-old child, she had an idea for a sculpture. 

“I was trying to figure out what I wanted to make it out of, and when I walked through Home Depot and ran my hands over materials, steel sang the right song,” Olin said. “So I found an artist in Chicago who would teach me … and five weeks after I delivered, I started welding.”

Throughout her life, steel became her main medium. She even taught a class called "Zen and the Art of Welding" in Chicago. Schedule supervisors said she needed at least six students to sign up to go forward with the class. Over the course of a year, she wound up getting 300 sign-ups to learn the art of zen and hot liquid metal. 

“The beautiful thing about steel in particular is you can always undo it, you can always grind it away, you can always re-weld it," Olin said. "On one hand, there's an awesome level of instant gratification. On the other hand, when I'm welding if you're not paying attention to exactly that point of contact, you're not going to do it well. By paying that close attention everything else goes away. It can be physically taxing depending on what position you're in, but it's mentally, incredibly relaxing. It's a really good definition of being in the zone, where time doesn't matter, effort doesn't matter. Things just flow and you're moving liquid metal around."

Olin’s axiom is that she makes things. She’s dabbled in every medium throughout her life but keeps coming back to three-dimensional pieces and creations that spark her curiosity. As a kid, she grew up taking watches apart and putting them back together — unmaking and remaking. She was surrounded by a family of creators — two artist grandmothers, an uncle who became an Emmy-winning filmmaker and a father, now 87, with whom she still creates art. She takes after him, a man she calls “the quintessential jury rigger.”

“I learned early on, when I picked up a crayon and found the nearest wall, that I could do things and walk away and I could change other people's worlds by scribbling on things,” Olin said. “There were some times when I got yelled at but my folks were surprisingly understanding. It was really everything all at once. My sign-off on my email is ‘Stay curious’ because truly, between curiosity and humor, you can get through anything.”

Much of the work at All Angels is figurative, like the metal web of dancing human figures called “Pull Yourself Together” or the tall, spindly figures that are marching through the world, but there are also the spiky “fantasy seed” boxes that emulate fairy tale creations and the cubes suspended on spikes that float above their attached canvas. Those were a manifestation of early COVID energy.

“Inspiration really comes from life and experiences, whether it's the fantasy seeds that were inspired post-divorce pushing for new life and starting over,” Olin said. “It’s really everything from the struggles to the celebrations. The little cube pieces were definitely COVID-inspired. I’m not going anywhere. Let's see how complicated a process we can create … The cubes themselves are wood, but what's on top of them is layers and layers and layers and layers and more layers of paint.”

Olin is always creating her next idea, and that’s often steel. It’s the medium she’s been most drawn to over her life and her metallurgical makings are the bulk of the work on display at All Angels until the end of November.