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Dartmouth resident Tomas Paljic was never one to let anything go to waste.
"Growing up in Yugoslavia, my family was very poor," recalls the 38 year-old machinist, welder and steelworks artist. "We made use of anything and everything we could find just to scrape by. Once we had an apartment with no bath and my father lined the inside of an old refrigerator with plastic so we could wash up."
Paljic brought that kind of innovative thinking with him when he immigrated to Ontario in 1994.
"Things were bad back home with the war," he remembers. "And so I came to school in Canada."
It was while attending Niagara College that the young apprentice fell in love with a girl from Nova Scotia.
"After graduation we moved here and lived with her parents until we were married in 2002."
Soon after, and with a baby on the way, Paljic found work in the Burnside Business Park.
"I am fortunate to have such a great job so close to my home," he says of his position with a local engineering firm. "The timing could not have been better."
When he isn't plying his trade by day, the hard-working father of two is busy welding discarded bits of steel into towering works of art.
"It's something I started doing in college," he smiles shyly. "I never actually thought it would ever amount to anything."
Later this month, Paljic will bring several of his sculptures home to the former Yugoslavia as one of seven artists-in-exile invited to show at the refurbished Gelevic Museum in Belgrade.
"I haven't been back since the war," he confides. "It will be the first time that my parents will see my work. I am dedicating the show to my father. He inspired me to build a better life."
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