Continue to Reach
- 601 S. Main St., United States Post Office, Elkhart, IN 46514
Continue to Reach
Artist: Nathan Pauls
Information: Created in 2021; measures 7 feet by 2 feet, 7 inches; weighs 700 pounds; made from metal reclaimed from the scrapyard.
Description: Nathan chose this piece to be on display because it shows the industrial side of Elkhart County and the beauty that can come from industry. The pieces of the sculpture are from the scrapyard in Goshen which is an industrial, messy and dusty place. From all these different harsher parts was created a swooping more graceful piece. The piece is to convey a sense of interest and joy to the viewer. Nathan likes his work to have an element of interactivity to them, so the viewer can move from just viewing to interacting with the piece. The piece has several large parts — the large auger drill bit, the large metal post and wheel, and the metal scaffolding that is on top of the piece. These pieces guided the creative process of the artist. He started by welding all these pieces together and then adding “meat to the skeleton” by welding other tools and metal pieces to the sculpture. This sculpture has been on display outside the Visual Arts Building on the campus of Goshen College.
For sale: $1,000
About the artist: Nathan’s artistic inspiration is his subconscious and the people around him. When he creates a piece, he tries not to plan out very far ahead. Doing this allows him to go with what feels like the next right step, instead of trying to follow a rigid plan from beginning to finish. He hopes that his art can be accessible and a way for people to find joy. When Nathan makes a sculpture, he wants at least one part of it to be mobile, so that an observer can interact and “play” with the piece. That is why he is excited for the possibility of being part of this project. Having his sculpture where many people can see it without any restrictions feels right to him.
Nathan loves being an artist because it allows him to create things that are beyond his imagination. Most times when he makes something it turns out much differently than he imagined. It used to bother him, but now he looks at that unpredictability to make things that he never thought possible. Nathan has been a sculpture artist since 2019, the spring of his sophomore year of college. On the lawns next to the dorms at Goshen College, there were many fallen sticks from a recent storm. Instead of passing the branches by, he decided to prop them against one another to make a stick sculpture about 3 feet tall. It was at the end of the senior year that he took a sculpture class and learned how to weld.