Retrospective showcases WBHS student talent

Works of art, rocking chairs, finished quilts, pigs in pens and even a tiny house were among some of the sights that visitors to Wittenberg-Birnamwood High School saw during the school’s Retrospective presentation May 5.

Retrospective allows the school to showcase the artistry, craftsmanship and skills of its students and show that the high school experience is not limited to the basics.

For Sarabeth Bernarde, a junior, showing off a quilt with patterns of bees and honeycombs was particularly satisfying.

“I picked out seven different fabrics, and then I had to cut each fabric into a 3½-by-3½ (inch) square,” Bernarde said. “When you sew them together, you do it in a 9-by-9 (inch) block, and you do the same pattern in each block.”

The quilt consists of 72 of those blocks, Bernarde said, and it has to be done in strips with alternating patterns.

“There’s an internal pattern within the actual pattern of the quilt,” she said. “It’s folded like a sandwich, and it holds everything together.”

Bernarde put the quilt together in under six weeks, but a lot of the time, she took the quilt home to work on it there.

“I would work on it in class, but then I would take a lot of it home,” Bernarde said. “I think I spent three solid days just organizing blocks. The last night that I worked on it, I worked for three hours.”

This was not Bernarde’s first quilt, however. She worked with her aunt on another quilt previously, and after that, she knew she wanted another smaller quilt. The quilt was part of the independent project that was part of her sewing class at the high school.

Bernarde’s family is into beekeeping, which is why the quilt had a motif of honeycombs and bees.

While Bernarde was showing off the quilt, Olyvia Stark, another junior, was cloistered away in the art room, crafting a ceramic bowl. She was using a spinning wheel to help the bowl take shape.

“I’ve been doing it for about three years,” Stark said. “Basically, you just put the clay on the center, and then you make it so it doesn’t move around a lot. Then you stick your thumb in and move the edges out more. Then you basically have a bowl.”

Stark estimated she’s made about 500 bowls in her time, but she’s also made mugs, plates, a tea set, a casserole dish and other ceramics, too. From start to finish, each item takes her about three to five days.

“It takes me about 15 minutes to make a bowl,” Stark said. “It takes quite a while in the kiln. I need to bake it, glaze it, bake it again.”

Stark stumbled onto ceramics by accident. She needed to take an extracurricular activity at a previous school and decided to pursue ceramics. It turned out to be a good match.

“I started out sculpting clay not on the wheel, just like sculpting little figures and little animals, and then I got into this,” Stark said. “It’s very enjoyable and very relaxing.”

She sees herself continuing with ceramics after high school but figures it will be more of a hobby than a career. Stark already exhibits her work outside of Wittenberg, noting that her stepmother owns the 1966 store in Madison.

“I support local artistry down at my stepmom’s store, and she does, too,” Stark said. “Sometimes I’ll make a bowl and have it on display there, and she’ll either keep it or sell it.”

A couple of doors down in the wood shop, a number of student-constructed wood pieces sat on display for visitors. One of them was a wooden rocking chair with the silhouette of a deer etched on the backrest made by Larken Betry, a senior.

“I was looking for a project, and I found one online,” Betry said. “I thought I’d look into it and see what I could do.”

He decided to use a deer silhouette to go along with his interests in hunting. He went a step further by incorporating shed deer antlers around the legs and the back. The process took Betry about four or five months to complete, he said.

“I felt like it would have a rustic look with some antlers,” said Betry, who noted it took him a while to come up with the dimensions for the chair. “It’s kind of rewarding to see the end finish for something like this. It was my goal to make something that I could remember and look at a lot.”

Retrospective also gave community members a chance to see the new agriculture building and how it was being used. Matt Christian, the agriculture teacher at WBHS, noted that the current greenhouse is leaps and bounds better than the old lean-to greenhouse that the FFA had.

“This space makes it so much easier,” Christian said. “Everything in here is temperature-controlled, run by a control panel behind the door. If it’s 76 degrees, the roof vent will open to start the cooling process.”

On the other side of the ag building is a facility for students to raise animals — including pigs, goats and cows. Christian noted that the school is working with Jake Roth of Jake’s Pig Palace in Eland, who donated some of the pigs for the students to work with.

Another attraction at Retrospective was a tiny house that students have spent more than a year building. The house, which is expected to be finished by the time school ends in June, will be sent to Colorado to be used for a rental unit through AirBNB, according to Caleb McPhail, a trades teacher at the high school.

“It’s been a great opportunity for our students to learn a lot of the aspects of building — electrical, plumbing, the framing, roofing and now finish work,” McPhail said, noting that the schools closing in March 2020 due to the pandemic slowed things down considerably. “We’re making the cabinets and the cabinet doors. Pretty much everything is getting made in-house.”

lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com