Post Star 8/27/2011
Wilton Sept. 11 monument to be ready in time for anniversaryRead more: http://poststar.com/news/local/wilton-sept-monument-to-be-ready-in-time-for-anniversary/article_b3e45b74-d02b-11e0-82aa-001cc4c002e0.html#ixzz1WF7BhkTG
WILTON -- When officials with the Wilton Fire Department received a long-awaited piece of the former World Trade Center, they weren't exactly sure what to do with it.
So they took it to an artist.
Michelle Vara, a sculptor in the town for 25 years, went to work on the twisted section of a steel I-beam the department had requested roughly four years ago.
"They said, ‘Use your judgment. Make it a sentence. Make it a statement,'" Vara said.
The sculpture - and the metals she added to it, each with its own meaning - will be displayed at the firehouse on Ballard Road in time for the coming 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
It's smaller and less controversial than the towering metal sculpture Saratoga Springs officials recently backed away from displaying in front of City Hall.
Vara, who operates 6 Ballard Road Art Studio Gallery, said her piece has a different feel. She said it's one of "positive retrospect," and that she was drawn to the unity she saw after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Some really awesome things came out of an awful event," she said. "The camaraderie of human existence is mind-blowing - how people took care of their neighbors."
While most of the metal in the sculpture was deliberately rusted by Vara, one piece was not: a piece she bent into a circle. It stands out with a silver shine in the sculpture.
"The circle represents unity, how everyone came together and how people worked together - people from all walks of the Earth," she said.
One of the legs is wavy and inconsistent with the others, which she said represents the questions that remain unanswered about the disaster.
Firefighter Ray Bailey, who requested the piece of metal years ago when he was the department's president, got a glimpse of it for the first time Friday.
"I think it's wonderful," he said. "I think it's very expressive, and I think she did a good job conveying the energy and the emotion."
He said it was a meaningful coincidence that, after waiting years to find out if the department would receive the metal - and then a few more to actually get it - it arrived just months before the 10th anniversary of the attacks.
When it's put on display, the department plans to incorporate a multimedia showing of a decade-old project called "Through the Eyes of a Child," Bailey said. It consists of letters written by young children of firefighters in the department reflecting on the attacks shortly after they happened.
Many of the children who wrote those letters, Bailey said, are now firefighters.
