DuluthCommunityNews

A car wreck, that happened eight years ago, brought her lifelong passion of raising and showing horses to an end. She was barely even able to walk for two years.

So she sold her Texas horse farm and moved back to her hometown Wrenshall, Minn. where her father was still living. Although Sandra had been away from her father for years, she still found some of his old habits aggravating. One of them was to burn garbage rather than to recycle it. She constantly reminded him of the pollution that he caused by doing so.

And so one day her father handed her a big leaf bag filled with newspapers and said, "If you can make some use out of this, I'll start recycling."

She took up the challenge, doing everything she could think of to make something out of the old newspaper that would otherwise be set aflame in her father's back yard.

For three months she scrunched it. She shredded it. She rolled it. She did everything she could
think of to make use of it until one day an interesting idea dawned on her--boil it--and so she did. She boiled it into a pulp. And with time she learned that she could dry the pulp into different textures. And with the right texture she learned that she could add a dry paste. And with that dry paste and pulp she could add plaster and dried glue to make a viable mixture that looked like clay. And with that clay she made her first tiles.

Tiles with egyptian heiroglyphs, buddhist prayer wheels and harmonic anagrams--all derived from her love of ancient magic symbols.

Though she set out to take her new-found hobby up a notch, she decided to sculpt faces of mythical creatures out of her clay.

She had never done anything like that before, so she practiced molding over 20 of them on one 2-by-4 foot piece of her clay. The result of this was purely an accident--the ghostly piece she calls "Apparitions." It's eerie faces that peer out at visitors to Sandra's current art display at Washington Galleries in Duluth, in which her first tiles are on display along with more recent face sculptures. She has been living at Washington Studios Apartments upstairs for two years now, and still makes her clay and molds her sculptures eight years after that fateful car wreck.

And that's how Sandra found her new passion. It was an accident.