The first time Madison 's Erika Koivunen used a blow torch in an art class, she was hooked.

"I knew I had to keep welding, " said the petite 32-year-old UW graduate. "I like the smell of grease, the oil-gas mixture you put in lawn mowers is very comforting to me, and I like the sounds of welding. " Then there was her enthusiasm for collecting scrap metal. "I can 't walk past a rusty bolt on the sidewalk without picking it up, " she explained.

Finding a way to turn those twin passions into a career that paid the rent was another matter. For that, Koivunen turned 10 years ago to the well-known salvage artist and fantasist, Dr. Evermor (aka Tom Every), who has been working on his version of alternate reality known as the Evermor Historic Artistic Sculpture Park on Highway 12 near Baraboo for decades.

Among the 1,200 tons of scrap metal sculptures, there are birds the size of elephants, enormous spiders, lizards, bugs and the famous Forevertron with its moving parts, lasers and telescopes. Evermor 's other sculptures are in collections and museums across the United States, and his work is featured in 35 books.

"I went to Dr. Evermor and told him I wanted to weld, and that I wanted to weld three butterflies, " Koivunen recalled of that fateful first encounter. "He 's always surrounded by people, he sort of holds court for visiting professors and friends. So he turned to them and said, This little girl is going to weld 1,000 butterflies. ' "

Even though Koivunen only wanted to make three butterflies, she didn 't stop until she 'd created a swarm of 1,018, and named each one. "I couldn 't stop," she says.

Her butterflies were mounted on an old carousel armature, and are now one of the attractions at the Sculpture Park, which the public can visit free.

"I was impressed with the fact that this young woman actually had a serious passion to do welding, " said Evermore, now 69. "She was dynamic, and not only is she technically good at welding, she has all this imagination. "

Since then, Koivunen, who has a B.S. in art from UW, has spent many happy hours welding with her mentor. "We like each other 's spirits, " she said. "We like bringing new life to old things. He taught me how to take shape you 're presented with and bring out its possibilities. You look at these pieces of metal, and you don 't know what is going to come out. A woman once asked me to make a sculpture of her dog, but I couldn 't do it. The materials dictate what the piece is going to turn out, not the other way around. And then these creatures come out, and you think, Oh, hi! It 's you! ' "

Koivunen leapt into the scrap metal heap without a safety net. After saving $2,000, she quit her job at a bookstore and declared herself a self-employed artist. She didn 't, however, have a studio or any welding equipment. Her first commission was a request for a painting by a writer who wanted a portrait of herself superimposed on a ouija board. "Those first years are kind of a blur. I don 't remember exactly how I made it. But since I use only scrap metal, my overhead is really low. "

Along the way she 's found kindred spirits, collaborators and people to share the mortgage: her fiance, Aaron Howard, who is a blacksmith with Custom Metals (he made the pewter bar at Sardine restaurant) and his sister Missy Howard, a jewelry maker. The Howard family has a jewelry school and workshop in Stoughton, where Koivunen works on bigger pieces and has the use of a plasma cutter. She also works in the garage at her East Side home, which has a surprisingly orderly inventory of rusty bolts, nuts, rods, broken tools, dented trumpets, car parts, bed springs, assorted blades, casters and objects that defy identification.

Awareness of Koivunen 's work has spread mostly by word of mouth, though her profile got a major uptick when Barrique 's on West Washington Avenue installed 72 feet of railing she created.

"They asked me what it was going to look like, but I really didn 't know. I knew I was going to use rings from swingset seats and some blades, but that was about it. They really made a leap of faith. "

She 's also had gallery shows, including one at Absolutely Art on Atwood Avenue, and she helped Evermor make the pair of 35-foot tall birds for the park at the corner of Williamson and Paterson Streets, and sold many pieces to private collectors. She is currently working on gates for the Midvale Community Garden. She 's made many thousands of sculptures, and along the way collected a few scars on her forearms.

"It 's like handling snakes, " she says. "When you do it all the time, it 's not frightening. I haven 't cut or burned myself nearly as much as you 'd assume. There 's a problem with fumes, though, so you have to weld under a hood with an exhaust fan. "

Despite the random nature of the materials she uses, she 's also developed a distinctive style, and makes pieces that are much smaller and more curvilinear than that of Dr. Evermor. "Doc says I put my feminine energy into metal. I curve it around. "

Evermor, who refers to himself in the third person, said his protege has developed a style very different from his own.

"The little lady may have picked up some things from me, but she cuts and shapes and forms things and that 's entirely different from what Evermor does.

"Evermor doesn 't change the original forms and treats everything as a piece of history, buried treasure. He takes things as they are and welds them together in new ways. But Erika 's work is terrific. "