Art students at Valley Regional High School are close to completing a sculpture titled Nightwatch, which tells the story of the British raid on Essex during the War of 1812.

Work on the sculpture, with contributions by 11 students, began in 2019 under the guidance of fine arts instructor Val Krop, but was interrupted in March 2020 as a result of lockdowns brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, according to Paige Lee, one of the artists behind the work.

“It was a big pause. For the majority of the pandemic during online learning, we rarely saw it, and was just something sitting in Krop’s class taking up a lot of space. It was really only something we could do in person, not online,” she said.

The total piece, which is broken into two halves upon separate walls, was inspired by the 1814 British raid of Essex, a maritime event during the War of 1812 that Lee said she initially from a book she read in elementary school titled The British Raid on Essex: The Forgotten Battle of the War of 1812, written by local author Jerry Roberts. The book tells the story of the evening of April 8, 1814, when 136 British Royal marines and sailors burned 27 American vessels docked at Essex Harbor. It was the largest maritime loss for the United States during the war.

The history encompassing the piece was a major part of the work, especially with its particular position in the school, hanging in the center of a staircase that connects two hallways, with the upstairs hall being the location of the majority of the school’s history classrooms. That was a fact strongly considered by Lee and Parrish Ceplenski, both of whom were the project’s co-leading student artists.

“It’s something that isn’t taught here at Valley, so we thought it would be a very interesting way to teach people about it, and to be seen every day,” said Lee.

That historical weight of the event and its relevance especially for Connecticut and residents of the tri-town region, was echoed by student artist Zachary Kirla.

“We wanted to bring the three towns together in a sculpture, and the history,” he said. “We had a bunch of different ideas, and the teachers voted on which one they would want to see in the hallway.”

Working on the piece, Krop and the students established a “Nightwatch Activity” work time, which called for weekly 60- to 90-minute sessions, while students also dedicated lunchtime for development, and two all-day in-school field trips to make greater progress. This was a practice that started before lockdown, and then continued once the students returned to school in-person.

When the project began, Krop approached students with the challenge of developing an idea for a large-scale project, which led to building an architectural model of the piece and the space it would take up. Lee and other students came up with a systematic approach for the placement of pieces for the sculpture, including using variations of code words on the individual pieces.

Structurally, the sculpture is primarily made of aluminum sheet metal (donated by the L.C. Doane Company) and colored plexiglass, and required the students to learn how to weld and work with new materials, which was challenge, according to Lee and Kirla. After deciding when to incorporate the plexiglass pieces to represent most of the Connecticut River and the flames of the centerpiece ship, the entire metal part of the piece that had been completed needed to be taken apart for the plexiglass to be installed, and then for the metal pieces to be positioned back into their correct locations.

“These guys did an awesome job of marking everything. It was step-by-step directions as they were building it,” Krop said.

Some of the key elements, bringing area towns together as a whole, include the centerpiece of the burning ship, the gradually building waves from Chester Ferry, a striped bass and a to-be placed sturgeon fish, and the Saybrook Breakwater Lighthouse. Once the project is completed, lights will be installed to shine on the piece.

Lee expanded on the element of the waves.

“In the beginning it was just waves, and there wasn’t much meaning, we just had a couple things that were brought in that were hidden, like a puzzle or an ‘I spy’ kind of thing,” she said. “As we kept going, we learned more about the history of the Long Island Sound, and decided it would fit to have the Sound bleed out of the burning of the ship, that way it included more of the history.”

Kirla, one of the artists responsible for the boat centerpiece, further commented on the waves and intertwining challenges of sculpture’s physical aspects and the people involved.

“The grinding [was a challenge]. You have to have the same person do it, or else the piece is going to look different. All the waves have the lines on them, and if multiple people do them, it’s not going to look continuous, and not everyone came every day, so it was hard to get it done,” he said.

But up against newly acquired artistic techniques, a pandemic, personnel issues, and meticulous reassembly, the students overcame the challenges to complete the work and memorialize a sometimes forgotten piece of American history. As one of the leaders of the sculpture, Lee made sure that the outcome reflected the original vision of the piece to be historically all-encompassing for the tri-town region.

“The vision evolved over time because we were learning new things, reading books about Essex, Chester, and Deep River. But I was making sure everything was truly how it should be. It just shows what people should be learning about, the history of these towns and what’s bringing us all together.”

Find more photos of the project with this story on Zip06.com, as well as a link to a time-lapse video of the sculpture installation.