With Tiles & Tin Can Luminaries, ECoCA Rings In A Decade

Ruby Szekeres Photos. Artist and maker Jared Holt is pictured at the top. 

The sound of metal on metal filled the cavernous entrance of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art (ECoCA). Each bang indicated another dent into an unusual canvas. A mountain of blank cans, once home to tomatoes, waited to become bright decorations for a coming celebration.

That scene came to ECoCA on Sunday afternoon, as participants gathered for a “Tin Can Luminaria” workshop led by artist and maker Jared Holt. Hosted as part of Tin There, Done That, an exhibition fêting the organization’s 10th anniversary, the workshop taught attendees to turn their discarded and empty tin cans into lighting décor for an ECoCA benefit gala on April 26.  

Tin and aluminum are the materials most commonly associated with 10th anniversaries. Sunday, participants sketched out and hammered designs while taking cues from Holt, a blacksmith, tinkerer of all trades and professor at the University of Hartford. ECoCA staff and board members credited the Alphabet Academy & The Nest, which donated several used tin cans beforehand for the project.  

“I’ve done it just as a fun craft on my own,” Holt mused as he worked and supervised other designs. “But you don’t realize how much work goes into it until you do it.”

One nail at a time, he showed participants (including this reporter and her dad) how. Working methodically, participants carefully positioned nails over patterns that ranged from kites to clouds to landscapes. Every time someone hammered, the whole table moved, sending cans and nails rolling onto the floor.

When at last the table stayed still, attendees-turned-artists held their newly-hammered designs up to the light to see if the nails had gone all the way through. 

“Using a can with a lid still attached captures the light much better,” one participant observed.

While Holt worked inside with solid metal, ECoCA held a tile casting and carving workshop outside, to capture the full breadth and flexibility of the metal in action (while the luminaria entailed hammering solid tin, the tiles involved casting molten aluminum). 

Artists Elli Fotopoulou and Patrick Henry.

In the center’s backyard, artists Elli Fotopoulou and Patrick Henry, both graduates of Yale’s MFA program, led participants in making their own molds, supervising as people carved designs in resin sand bricks. When the designs were finished, participants used the bricks  as molds, pouring aluminum to create a cast. 

After removing the newly-formed casts from the brick and scrubbing them in cold water with a wire-hair brush, they let them dry in the cold air.

Many there Sunday were part of the ECoCA community, and excited to participate in activities celebrating the space’s decade of artmaking and hosting exhibitions. Nigerian artist Mesoma Omyeagba, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, said she was glad to be there to support ECoCA and their ten years of success. 

“I am pretty new here, but I am happy to see such a great community celebrate this milestone,” she said. She had come to ECoCA the previous year where she had her first solo exhibition featuring her textile-based art.

Mesoma Omyeagba. “I am pretty new here, but I am happy to see such a great community celebrate this milestone,” she said.

Chatting as she assisted attendees, Fotopoulou said she found her way to casting through a life of working with metal, and an appreciation for the material. “I am glad I was able to share that today,” she said. 

Henry added that “My practice led me to it. I was doing wood carving before and then I experimented with different materials and used metal.”

ECoCA Director Aimée Burg, meanwhile, said she was also very excited for the workshops—and for this 10-year chapter in the Center’s history. In the past decade—including before Burg’s tenure—the Ely Center has hosted dozens of exhibitions and also been a rotating door to many of the city’s artists.

“As someone new to the Ely Center, it’s just going to be great to see what comes in the next ten years,” Burg said. Burg has been with ECoCA for the past year and a half and was happy to give the building a “new body” with a love for art.

This article comes from an alumna the 2024 Cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative. Ruby Szekeres is a sophomore at the Sound School.