The Pentucket Arts Foundation will be soon be celebrating its 10th year anniversary. “To commemorate Pentucket Arts Foundation’s 10 years of “Arts Connecting Community”, the foundation has commissioned Sean Bixby to create “a collective public art piece.”

Sean Bixby, better known as Mr. Bixby to his Graphic Design and Video Production students here at Pentucket, grew up in Merrimac, graduated from Pentucket, and went on to graduate from Hartford Art School with a major in Illustration.

Aside from teaching at Pentucket, Bixby is a freelance artist and illustrator and you can find his illustrations in published children’s books. But he said that his close connections to the tri-towns made making this sculpture even more special.

Bixby said that he started his creative process by thinking about how he wanted the sculpture to look: “I started to think about if it would it be freestanding or mounted on a wall.” He ultimately chose freestanding.

Bixby then drew out his ideas in charcoal sketches to show the foundation of his ideas, and then he got started.

He called the structure for the sculpture a “Bunker Hill Monument with a spin.” The base of the sculpture is three feet wide and the three walls stand seven feet tall. He decided to build the sides out of wood to make “a background as interesting as the objects that will be on it.” On three sides, as well as the top of the sculpture, all the various objects donated by community groups from each of the towns will be collaged.

Bixby said he was given over fifty objects that included “everything from a stuffed tiger to an old lottery ticket” to work with, and that “some objects stood out [to me] more than others” but he allowed himself to be “open-minded” with the process.

Some of the objects he inlaid into the wood and some protrude for the added effect of depth. He also added blue texture in the middle of the sculpture to represent the Merrimack River that flows through all three towns.

After the sculptures unveiling, Thursday May, 22 at six o’clock in the high school cafe, it will be take turns on display at all the local libraries over the summer and will eventually take residence in the high school library.

If you can’t make it to the unveiling tomorrow night in the cafe, be sure to stop by your local library over the summer to see an amazing, meaningful sculpture by none other than Mr. Bixby.