A big, rather scary dragon atop a Nashville tree owes its shiny existence to metal sculptor Zophia Kneiss of New Tazewell.
At 22 feet tall and 33 feet long, the dragon perches outside the Nashville Children's Theatre. Apart from its size, it is one impressive animal. Solid steel bars form the dragon's skeleton, and metal scales of varying sizes its skin. "I like to overdo it," Kneiss says. "It's important to make things that will last forever."
The creature Kneiss nicknamed Eli has a friend - a metal child sitting nearby on a metal tree limb.
Kneiss created the $50,000 sculpture in 2007; this holiday season she fashioned metal Santa hats for both dragon and child.
Her high-ceiling Burning Art studio on Highway 33 South retains its past look of a boat and car repair shop. Its vast, dark interior is warmed by a wood-burning stove, and houses grinders, a plasma cutter, blacksmithing tools and clamps, hammers, wrenches, pinchers and pliers. The sculptor-welder-artist-fabricator works with metals such as steel, aluminum and more.
Not everyone has room for a 33-foot dragon - or the 9-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus rex that Kneiss built for a Bristol, Va., firm. So Kneiss, 33, also shapes metal into smaller hand-designed garden stakes, waving flowers or swirling wall sculptures. Her 9- and 10-foot flowers were in the 2008 Dogwood Arts Festival's Art in Public Places outdoor show. A 400-pound Holstein cow of mild steel rods and sheet metal stands in a Blount County pasture.
Price wise, her pieces run the gamut: A whimsical table is $400; a gate adorned with cattails and ducks costs $5,000.
For customers more interested in function than art, Kneiss fabricates aluminum trailers and repairs metal stairs. To further supplement her artist salary, the former Peace Corps worker also is a farrier who shoes horses. Maybe, one day, she'll blend art with that work. She says she'd like to build a metal horse in the future.
Her work now includes 12- to 14-inch mild steel angels in her "Dreamz With Wings" project. Each angel with swirling wings is shaped like a person or animal. At $50 each, the sculptures are a symbol of support and a way to help her partner, Julie Thurman, pay bills in Thurman's battle against breast cancer. Kneiss has sold 35 angels; her goal is 100.
Kneiss remembers that she was "always an artist" from elementary school on. Her father taught her functional welding a few years later. "I was 13 or 14 and I would just weld things together," she said.
Art and metal came together when she took her first metal art class at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. Art wasn't her main study. She majored in ecosystems science and planned to join the Peace Corps.
As a Peace Corps worker, Kneiss spent three years in the forest jungles of the Philippines' Kabayan, Benguet, region. She says working with native people affected her and her work, underscoring the idea that the art of science and beauty of art relate and that "craftsmen should be involved in their community."
Back in the United States, she moved to Atlanta and took welding certification classes at Dekalb Technical College. About four years ago, she escaped Atlanta's traffic and crowds for the Tennessee countryside not far from Norris Lake. Here, her first major work was that T-rex.
Kneiss created the dinosaur she calls Kayuga for Bristol Galvanizing, whose motto is "Don't let your steel become extinct." The 2006 sculpture was galvanized by the firm and earned an American Galvanizing Association artistic award. But her largest commission so far is the Nashville dragon and child.
"I loved the building (of the dragon) although there were actually a lot of 14-hour days," she says. "I think the planning is the hard part."
Once she submitted the design, children helped pick a winning artist from five finalists' drawings. Kneiss' work won because it was exotic and somewhat scary, says Julee Brooks, the theater's education director. "He was just scary enough to be cool," says Brooks.
"I like hearing that it makes people smile," says Kneiss. "I love it when kids enjoy it."
While the dragon is only intended for a metal child to sit near, Kneiss would like to one day build metal art installations as sculptural playgrounds for real children.
"If kids had a lot of money, I think I'd be rich."
Amy McRary may be reached at 865-342-6437.