Shoppers find artful bargains at Wiregrass festival

The centerpiece of sculptor Karyn Adamek's display at Saturday's Celebration of the Arts was a life-sized horse's head built from the steel castoffs of modern life.

A close examination of the sculpture revealed industrial-sized bolts, wrenches, huge hex nuts. Its mane was made of heavy-duty hooks. Large washers and even a few horseshoes were part of the mix as well.

Adamek's flair with a welding torch caught the eye of Ginger Nucamendi of Wesley Chapel.

"This is what you want to buy for your house because it's so good," Nucamendi said.

Adamek, a Lutz resident, was one of dozens of artists who lined the internal road through the Shops at Wiregrass for the weekend arts festival sponsored by the Greater Wesley Chapel Chamber of Commerce.

The festival, which continues into this evening, reopens at noon Sunday.

The artists featured at the festival work in nearly every medium imaginable from stained-glass to acrylic paint to metal. The festival also includes music, activities for children and an exhibit by Tampa's Museum of Science and Industry.

Like several of her counterparts, Adamek's doubled as recycling by creating art from material that otherwise would have been thrown away. Nearby, Kris Wilcox of Busnell, turned used wine and whiskey bottled into hand-painted vases and Angela Dickerson of Tampa displayed jewelry made from recycled copper and other metals.

But it was Adamek's life-sized horse sculptures that drew passers-by to her booth. Each 500-pound sculpture was made from old railroad spikes.

Adamek, who co-owns a technology consulting firm as her day job, spends long days on her art. She spent two years learning to weld, including classes at a technical school and an unpaid apprenticeship repairing gates and fencing.

"I feel like I'm drawing with the metal," Adamek said. "Instead of working with a pencil and paper, I use my welder and the steel."

For the record, Adamek said, the spikes came from a collection on private property - not from scavenging along railroad tracks.

"They frown on that," she said of the railroad owners.

With her supply of railroad spikes used up, Adamek scrounges flea markets and other places for old steel she can use in her art - hence the head built from bits and pieces.

"If you're going to have a conversation piece," Nucamendi said of the head, "this is a conversation piece."