The Nature of Art & Engineering
Sigrid “Siri” Herlvelsen notices things most people walk past. A twist in a branch. A swirl in a patch of moss. The way a creek bends against its banks as if the water were sketching its own route through the woods. She calls them “organic funky shapes”—the swirls and squiggles hidden in ordinary places—and they have shaped her approach to art for as long as she can remember.
On Miller School’s 1,100-acre campus, she has plenty of space to look closely. She thinks best when she’s perched in a tree—any tree, really, though she’ll cheerfully recommend the one near the upper soccer field or the one shading the front disc-golf basket. If she isn’t up in a branch, she’s at the lotus pond, at the lake, or wandering along the creek, taking in the colors and contours that later appear in her sketchbook. She works in the Art Room too, though she prefers to save that space for class time or office hours. Inspiration, she says, needs room to roam.
Her latest piece—an “Altered Background & Personal Foreground” watercolor-gouache-colored-pencil hybrid—captures exactly that spirit. It is bright, layered, and a little strange in the best way. “I had a lot of fun making something weird and that felt like me,” she says with a grin that suggests the piece is already nudging her toward the next one.
The past few years, Siri’s way of seeing has found an unexpected outlet: the engineering shop.
Each fall, the engineering team begins on one of Miller School’s most ambitious year-long projects—designing and building a concrete canoe. Students carve foam molds, test new concrete mixes, debate hull geometry, and slowly coax a boat into existence. It is technical, meticulous work, and yet the room is full of imagination: sketches taped to walls, prototypes leaned against workbenches, and the steady hum of problem-solving.
Siri doesn’t claim to be the team’s secret weapon. In fact, she resists the idea entirely. “I wouldn’t say I have improved the design,” she insists. “The whole team has worked hard together brainstorming and tinkering. I just bring it to life on paper.”
But that contribution has mattered.
Where the engineers see angles, she sees flow. Where CAD software produces a precise contour, she instinctively notices where the line feels too heavy or too stiff. Her drawings show the canoe not as an object to be measured, but as something meant to move through water—something with a posture, a rhythm, a breath. Those sketches help the team refine curves, adjust transitions, and imagine the final form not as a calculation, but as a vessel.
Ask her how art and engineering relate, and she doesn’t hesitate. “You can bring beauty into engineering and function into art,” she says. She loves making things that work, whether it’s a purely functional object with a painted detail or a painting with moving components. She moves easily between disciplines because, to her, they aren’t separate at all. They share the same core impulse: to shape the world with intention.
Engineering teacher Christine Zito sees in Siri the rare student who moves between art and construction without changing pace. “She steps up whenever the team needs her,” Zito says. Siri designed the t-shirts, report covers, and infographic that introduce the team long before the canoe touches water—work polished enough, Zito notes, to stand out among college programs. And she’s equally present on the build team, helping construct the display that frames the vessel on competition day.
That way of seeing extends beyond the shop. Siri is, above all, an observer—someone who pays close attention to the small, surprising details that many people her age simply don’t stop to notice. She’s thoughtful about this. “I would like to think people my age pay attention,” she says, “but lately it’s become a little scarce from my observations.” We all notice different things, she explains. The combination of those perspectives—the “big mush of different interests”—makes a community richer. She might not care about the stitching on a baseball, but a teammate might. She’ll notice the silhouette of a tree instead.
Noticing, she believes, is an art in itself. “It’s so lovely,” she says. “When a friend gets a haircut, you can point it out and make them crack a smile.” When people stop noticing, life flattens. But when you look closely, “the cobwebs turn into intricate lace instead of grime.”
Miller School has shaped her perspective in ways she didn’t expect. She arrived drawn to people and nature; she now sketches buildings she once walked past without a second thought. The campus has given her space—literal and figurative—to wander, experiment, and find her own way as an artist. That freedom has helped her imagine what she wants to pursue after her years on the Hill.
On launch day, when the concrete canoe slides into the water for its first true test, its shape will carry the fingerprints of many disciplines: engineering, design, patience, problem-solving. And woven into its lines will be Siri’s quiet gift—the gift of noticing, of seeing possibilities in the “funky shapes” of the world, and of helping others see them too.
