Lawrence has something in common with the sculpture Stephen Johnson and Cotter Mitchell are creating in honor of its 150th birthday.

Both were formed by heat and tension.

The New England settlers who founded the town in 1854 started with little but resolve and ended up with a community strong enough to defy pro-slavery factions and resilient enough to rebuild after William Quantrill burned it to the ground.

Johnson and Mitchell started with a few sheets of raw, 3/8-inch steel and an acetylene torch and ended up with a quartet of metal fingers that intertwine, stretch, bend and twist into a dancing flame that embodies the city’s spunky spirit of survival.

“The freedom we enjoy has been won through great difficulty and hardship,” Johnson wrote in his proposal for “Freeform,” which he designed and hired Mitchell to fabricate. “There have been flames of hatred as well as the flames of the passionate belief in striving towards the good.”

Johnson’s design turns the letters in the word “free” into abstract shapes painted in fiery red hues. Onlookers will have a chance to decipher the letters during an unveiling scheduled for 11:30 a.m. Thursday at the southwest corner of Sixth and Massachusetts streets.

Dick Holzmeister, chairman of the sculpture selection committee, thinks Lawrencians will be happy with the newest addition to the city’s public art collection.

Stephen Johnson, left, and Cotter Mitchell are putting the finishing touches on Freeform, a public sculpture that will be unveiled Thursday at the corner of Sixth and Mass.

“They had a cardboard copy of it that they put up a month ago, and we got a chance to look at it. It looks really good right there coming into the city,” he said. “A number of people stopped by and looked at it. They had a lot of good comments.”

Daily grind

The partnership between Johnson and Mitchell started in the late ’80s, when Johnson was an art undergrad at Kansas University. Around the Art and Design Building, Mitchell is the go-to guy for all things wood: frames for paintings, pedestals for sculptures, crates for shipping artwork.

He’s long been crafting custom boxes to ship Johnson’s paintings to galleries and museums around the country.

Last year, Mitchell fabricated the 12-foot by 18-foot aluminum wall sculpture Johnson designed to celebrate the Lied Center’s 10th anniversary. When Johnson was selected over a handful of other artists to make a piece in honor of Lawrence’s sesquicentennial, he knew just the person capable of bringing his drawings to life.

Mitchell bought the steel late last year and started mocking up the forms in February. A couple of cardboard models later, it was time to slice. He used a plasma cutter to get the rough shapes, but that was the easy part.

“It took me a couple of days to cut the steel, but it takes a couple of months to grind all these edges down,” Mitchell explained Tuesday, gesturing toward the yet-to-be-painted sculpture assembled in his rural Vinland yard. “There’s a lot of hard work there.”

As recently as last week, Mitchell was adding the final welds as he and Johnson sized up curves and made last-minute adjustments using a torch, clamps and ginger force.

“Now would not be the time to break this thing,” said Mitchell, who’s spent nearly as much time building jigs and support structures for “Freeform” as he has on the sculpture itself.

Case in point: A 16-foot-tall, steel A-frame with a hook and chain for hoisting towered over the piece last week. Mitchell created the simple machine to lift the sculpture off the ground for painting and, eventually, transport.

“It’s gonna make a great swing set,” his wife, Fadra, said.

Community symbol

Johnson spent a lot of time thinking about how “Freeform” would fit into its downtown home. The sculpture’s fire component complements Lin Emery’s kinetic “Flame” in front of City Hall; but its vivid paint job offers a contrast to the latter’s stainless gleam. Johnson even measured the giant stone memorial across the street at Robinson Park to get a sense of proportion.

Vinland craftsman Cotter Mitchell loosens a clamp on Freeform, a sculpture designed by Lawrence artist Stephen Johnson. Mitchell shaped the steel pieces by heating them with an oxyacetylene torch and bending them over pipes and other forms.

“The sculpture is almost the same size as the stone,” he said.

Passers-by will be able to use “Freeform” as a sort of spyglass, peering through its curves to frame the sculptures and memorials on the other three corners of the intersection.

The $50,000 project is funded by the Lawrence’s Percent for Art project, which sets aside up to 2 percent of the city’s capital improvement costs for art acquisition.

“Freeform” is not Johnson’s first Percent for Art commission. He received $35,000 in 2002 to create seven interactive robot sculptures, 12 original works of art and a rocket ship stepladder for Lawrence Memorial Hospital’s children’s wing. Mitchell had a hand in that project, too.

Johnson, who also writes and illustrates children’s books and last year completed a 66-foot by 11-foot glass mosaic mural in the DeKalb Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, N.Y., is glad to see his latest project coming together.

He hopes other Lawrence residents will see the city they know and love reflected in “Freeform.”

“I like the word ‘free’ because we’re in a free state,” he said. “And I like the word ‘free’ instead of ‘freedom,’ which is so laden with political camps since 9-11 and our political acts around the world.”