Cody and Annie Brower claim that they never had any specific aspirations to artistry, although the quality of their work might belie that.  The pair has been working on a range of art projects for the last several years, including some media that may be less familiar to the average person.

Cody, who spends his days as the Oneida County Prosecuting Attorney, has become accomplished at the fairly unusual craft of creating aluminum anthill sculptures.  The process involves melting aluminum in a homemade foundry, then pouring it into (usually abandoned) anthills.  As the metal makes its way through the existing ant tunnels, it solidifies into a three dimensional record of the habitat, which needs to be dug out of the earth.  “It’s hard to wait for it to be done.  We’ve definitely been burned more than once,” Annie says.  “The tricky thing is once you start pouring, you just don’t really know what you’re going to end up with.  Like this one here—” she says, pointing to the anthill sculpture displayed on the table, “when we dug it out it just kept going and going.  It ended up being pretty enormous!”    

The sculptures themselves end up demonstrating the complex network of chambers and tunnels created by the colony, including food storage areas and abandoned tunnel sections.  “For the anthills, very few people will guess what they are right away.  People think that it might be coral or driftwood, but almost no one guesses anthills,” Annie laughs.  “The Idaho variety, they just build these giant chambers.  We’ve wanted to go run over to Texas because they’ve got fire ants over there, and those make really cool networks, and different spots to go to.  As you start digging down into what’s there, you just feel like some kind of archaeologist, uncovering all of this.”

“I started it as kind of a hobby.  I built a foundry, and we melted aluminum and then I just started pouring it into stuff, and somebody saw it and said ‘Hey—would you bring it down to the Art Walk, and it’s just kind of gone from there,” Cody says.  “And it’s not something we really ever planned to make money on.  You have to find people with a dedicated space for them.”  The sculptures themselves are the size of decently grown potted plants.  

“Believe it not, anthill sculptures are pretty hard to sell—for one thing they’d be a nightmare to ship,” Annie adds.  “You kind of have to have a place for them, which a lot of people don’t.”

The process begins with heating the aluminum in a homemade foundry.  While that process is underway, the pair builds up sand around the base of the hill to keep the structure intact.  “About one out of three will end up collapsing, and doesn’t amount to anything.  It kind of just depends.  A really busy hill will have a lot of organic material in it, which doesn’t look quite as good,” Annie says.  “The abandoned hills make the best sculptures in the long run,” Cody says.  “The finished product is pure and silvery.  A really active anthill is going to have a certain amount of other material in it, which doesn’t work quite as well.”

Annie, who teaches ELA at Malad Middle School, is an accomplished maker of resin-based art.  Epoxy resin art can be made a number of different ways, but generally it involves adding pigment of one sort or another (Annie generally uses mica powder) to a mixture of art resin, then blowing it with hot air from a heat gun or blowtorch to create various color patterns and textures.  

“Annie’s stuff is a lot more commercially viable—she definitely sells hers,” Cody says.  The finished product is a shiny wash of complex color interactions.  “The idea is that the resin ends up with its own finish when it dries,” Annie explains.  Other components can be added into the resin to further amplify the textural quality.  Annie, who is originally from California, tends toward beach-reminiscent colors—greens, blues, and yellows.  “I love the beach ones,” she says.  Many of her resin works, in fact, resemble a beach scene as viewed from above.  She plans to try to generate the types of colors associated with Yellowstone hot pots and hot springs—primarily oranges and reds—in future projects.

Neither of the Browers began their art pursuits with any thought of making money from them.  They started as hobbies during the time Cody was finishing law school a number of years ago, and have honed their skills ever since.  “People definitely like to see them at things like the Art Walk.  We get a lot of people who are interested in finding out what they’re looking at,” Cody says.  

The Evening of the Arts is scheduled for April 14, from 6-8:30 p.m. at the Oneida County Event Center.  The event is free to the public, though much of the artwork will be up for auction as part of the fundraising efforts.  Proceeds will go to the Nell J. Redfield Memorial Hospital.