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GREENSBORO — Prick your finger on one of Frank Holder’s flame-red shards of aluminum, and you’d draw blood.

But Holder wants that.

He wants you to think of fire and broken glass. He wants you to see frozen flames rising Halloween-scary from his sculpture and think about pain, fear, hell on Earth.

Then, he wants you to stand back and walk around. There, the flames go ocean blue. There, the flames frame a silver figure of melted aluminum. There, the silver figure looks up, reaches up toward …

“Hope,” Holder says. “I didn’t want to do something that looked perfect because everybody has those moments of despair and depression. You’re never far away from the darkness that people get locked into.

“I mean, by the grace of God go any of us,” he says. “But think about walking around and seeing that blue. There’s a peace to it. Yes, there’s still that possibility of hell. But you can make that transition, that journey toward hope.”

Holder calls the piece “Offering Hope from Despair.” It’s the anchor of next weekend’s art auction, the year’s biggest fundraiser for the Mental Health Association in Greensboro.

At least 150 items will be auctioned, and organizers say they hope to raise $50,000. The auction’s centerpiece: Holder’s sculpture, a dangerous-looking piece of aluminum meant to convey the hard-to-understand journey of anyone struggling with mental illness.

But Holder, one of Greensboro’s most prominent sculptors, deals in loping curves, not hard edges. He looks at anything in nature — a broken shell, a cabbage leaf, a bird’s wings — and his imagination takes flight.

Then, he takes aluminum meant for house gutters or scrap yards and spends weeks heating, drilling, hammering and twisting them into pieces he calls “Fragment of Angels,” “Sculpting Light,” “Night Constellation” or “Clouds of Kelp.”

He does it all from his backyard studio off North Elm. It’s a solitary place where he listens to classical music, works beside his dogs, Bella and Nadine, near his two Amazon parrots, Baby Boy and Taco, and beneath a canopy of trees where birds always sing.

Holder usually deals in the beauty of nature, not the dark side of the soul. So, when the Mental Health Association asked him to donate a piece for the art auction, he tried something new. A former choreographer, he danced with words.

He thought of words such as “fire” and “flames” and “thorns” and sketched what he saw in his head. Then, he researched the association — and what it did — and spent a month turning its basic tenet of helping people toward recovery into art.

From hurt to hope. At least that’s how Holder sees it.

“I’ve been through bouts of depression, and it felt like this cloud I couldn’t escape from, and that started me off,” says Holder, 59. “So, this piece had to depict that barrier, that sharpness, that jagged, raw thing that can engulf us.”

Holder cut the shards into shape from thin sheets of aluminum. He painted them with an $8 can of red spray paint, ground them and painted them again to get that dried-blood look.

But that figure. That haunting figure of silver.

Holder created it out of ½-inch rods of aluminum that he melted down — drop by drop by drop — underneath a 1,100-degree flame.

He gave the figure a sphere, bent its androgynous head skyward and placed it in a forest of flames.

“The sphere is like offering wholeness,” Holder says, “the help.”

A sphere? Yes, Holder says, a sphere.

“Look at these wonderful lines,” he responds. “That is all what art is for me.”

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com.