Visitors to Rochelle this weekend will have a chance to see some unusual artwork in a field next to the city’s high school. It’s an appropriate venue, because the material used is often found in a field. It’s the first U.S. National Straw Sculpting Competition.
On a windy, sunny afternoon, George Harnish is directing a crew of friends and helpers as they carefully pull large straw-covered pieces out of a rental truck and begin setting up what turns out to be a sculpture of a bald eagle – a big one. Once all the parts are assembled, its outspread wings cover a span of at least 24 feet. For Harnish, it’s been a novel experience.
“I’m actually a snow sculptor up in Rockford and at nationals, as well as internationally, and I just thought it would be fun to do this medium, because you don’t have to wear as many clothes,” he chuckles.
Harnish says he’d never created a straw sculpture before, but he was intrigued by the challenge. And besides his snow work, he does have relevant experience.
"I was a theater teacher for about thirty-five years in the Rockford school systems, and in theater you’re building things out of papier-mâché and chicken wire all the time,” he says.
Not all the pieces are so large. One is a life-size rock musician that brings a whole new meaning to the term thrash guitar – or is that thresh? Another is a troll, like the dolls that have been around for decades, but several feet tall. There’s an outsized spider and a butterfly, and then there’s what Rochelle resident Bill Shermerhorn calls ”the Indian.” The eight-foot-plus creation is actually a much smaller copy of Lorado Taft’s monumental statue on the bluffs across the Rock River from Oregon, known to many as “Black Hawk” -- which has fallen into disrepair over the years.
“We did the Black Hawk in straw just to bring more attention to the need to restore the monument,” he says.
Shermerhorn is a third-generation plasterer who specializes in restoring and recreating the elaborate medallions and moldings in the interiors of historic old buildings. He’s worked on the Egyptian Theater in DeKalb and the Reddick Mansion in Ottawa, among others, but -- like the other artists in the competition -- he’d never worked with straw.
“It is kind of an interesting medium to work in. As long as you wet it up a little bit it’ll bend and twist and, if you have about a mile of twine, you can make it do anything,” he says.
Schermerhorn says it’s been a lot fun participating and meeting the other artists. He also says it’s good for the community to have an event like this.
It’s all the brainchild of professional artist Fran Volz. Volz mostly works in bronze, but he’s also a champion snow sculptor. He says the straw sculpting idea came about because of a trip with friends to a small town in Germany.
“They had two things there, a straw sculpting competition and a brewery. Well, we went to the straw sculpting competition, and I was amazed at these pieces that I saw. Out of curiosity, if nothing else, I took a lot of photographs to see their techniques,” he says.
Fast-forward five years, when the city of Rochelle entered the picture. Michelle Pease is Rochelle’s Community Development Director. She says the city had decided to put on a fall festival with the theme “Hay Days.” Several of the event’s planners were familiar with Volz’s work in a variety of materials.
“And so we reached out to him and said, ‘Hey, can you do something with straw or hay to help us promote the event?’,” she says.
Pease says they originally had in mind something several feet high that they could use for marketing. But then Volz, remembering that visit to Germany, came up with the idea for the competition and created a 21-foot-tall straw Statue of Liberty. It now stands on the south side of Illinois Route 38 as you enter Rochelle from the east. Volz says the experience taught him -- out of necessity -- a lot about straw sculpting. He knew the artists who answered his call for entries lacked that experience, so he decided to help.
“I added pages to my website on how – like Straw Sculpting 101, like a little college credited course, and so they used that for the basis for their pieces,” he says.
Pease says everyone is impressed with what Volz and the other artists have done. And she hopes the people coming to the “Hay Days” festival Saturday for touch-a-truck and other family activities will stop by the competition to view the works. They’ll even get to vote for their favorite piece. The winners will get a small monetary reward, which Volz hopes will at least defray some of the costs the artists incurred.
The pieces will be up for a couple of weeks, then come down. Shermerhorn says, after all the effort, it’s too bad the material isn’t longer-lasting. Harnish is more sanguine about that. He says his experience building and then tearing down theater sets taught him that you can’t get too attached to things -- even a labor of love.
Still, Volz hopes to preserve as many as he can. He’d like to store them and then, next year, put them up again beside a new crop of entrants. Then people would have twice as many, or even more, to view. One day, perhaps, the large empty field could be filled with straw creations.
Judging by the reactions so far, from both artists and the public, that’s a good possibility.
