Artist Alysse Einbender recalls creating her first sculpture. She was 10, and it was a delicate figurine of a dancer.

In her later years as a student at Connecticut College, a small liberal arts school in New London, she took modern dance. Perhaps that early interest in still life evolved into a need for flesh-and-bones movement.

Now well into adulthood, her chic, pixie-cut hair graying, Einbender still displays that slender terracotta figurine on a shelf in her home in Cheltenham’s tree-lined Twickenham Village neighborhood, and she has exhibited her work, which now trends toward the abstract. She also still dances, although her tastes have shifted from modern dance to ballroom, tango and salsa. Wearing an elegant flowing gown, carving out elegant, elaborately choreographed figures on the dance floor, she has performed before large, enthusiastic audiences for the Pan American Games and even a visit by Pope Francis.

A divorced mother of two adult sons, Alysse Einbender simply won’t slow down, and it seems no one can tell her there’s something she can’t do. Hers is a life of enviable achievement.

It didn’t always seem that way.

Back in 2004, Einbender had been working in landscape design for Wyndmoor’s Burke Brothers, yet another creative passion. In September of that year, she began suffering agonizing back pain. At first, she attributed it to her work, a result of lifting on the job. “I had been moving plants, heavy things, while the guys were doing paving and stonework. I thought it was just muscle strain, but it was excruciating,” she recalls. “I was suffering for a week.”

Initially, she drove herself to the hospital, where she was told that she did indeed have back strain, and she was given a prescription for Tylenol and codeine.

Forty-eight hours later, on Sept. 13, one of her legs began to give out and she could no longer empty her bladder. Her then husband was out of town, so she called one of her sisters to watch her kids and asked a neighbor to take her to the hospital.

The diagnosis: an arteriovenous malformation in her spine, or AVM, which is an abnormal, tangled web of leaking blood vessels. From that point on, Einbender would be paralyzed from the rib cage down. She would need a wheelchair. And for a time, she was plagued with self-pity and depression.

Literally adding insult to injury, four years after her diagnosis, her husband left her. “It was almost worse than losing my legs,” Einbender said.

In time, with the love and support of friends and relatives, she began to come back from the precipice.

“It took me about a year to get back to what I felt was independence,” Einbender said. “I got my driver’s license pretty quickly and I was also fortunate to score a motorized iBOT wheelchair.”

For a time, she even returned to landscape design, mostly residential jobs and some commercial assignments. She also worked for a landscape architect. But after a while, that kind of employment became less and less available.

Einbender began looking for a fresh challenge.

“And that’s when somebody said to me, ‘Why don’t you come with me and some friends to this church where we bring our art supplies and we just do whatever,’” she said. “So, I bought some clay and made my first figure in something like 15 years and, very slowly, I got hooked. I started at Abington Art Center because they had an elevator. And then it morphed after the teacher we liked left Abington. We followed him to a little independent studio in Cheltenham Village.”

She continues to go to the studio three times a week.

Sculpture, for Einbender, is far more than a purely creative exercise. It’s liberating.

“It’s meditative,” she explains. “It’s transformative, an expression of something that isn’t expressible through words. I forget about the pain, especially if I’m doing smaller work. It also gives me a community that I absolutely treasure.”

She points to one sculpture in particular to illustrate her point. She calls it “Inhale.”

“I had reached a point where I was no longer rageful at my ex. The kids were doing great. I was fully independent and I could finally breathe, and that’s what it meant for me,” Einbender said.

Another is called “Safe in the Embrace,” which is a tribute to the support of her friends.

“I wanted to call it ‘Atlas’ because it’s very global looking, but it was absolutely expressing that I finally felt safe,” she says. “I had the support that I needed, and I was proud to live again. I wasn’t proud when I was depressed.”

Using her talent to pay it forward, Einbender also has contributed bas relief works to the Souls Shot Portrait Project, which connects artists with families and friends of victims of gun violence.

But for Einbender, over time, sculpture alone was not enough. Boredom set in, especially in the evenings. She began to feel that she needed more reasons to smile, feel joy, and laugh. Especially, she said: laugh.

She saw a notice on the bulletin board at Moss Rehabilitation Center for wheelchair ballroom dancing. And that led her to an organization called American Dancewheels (ADW).

She didn’t have any idea what wheelchair ballroom dancing might be about.

“I thought it would be two wheelchair users trying to dance, and I thought, it’ll be full of collisions,” Einbender said. “It’s going to be a riot.”

Not so, as it turned out. ADW consists of one partner standing, the other in a wheelchair.

The ultimate mission of ADW, Einbender said, is to make wheelchair users be seen.

“Take up space, let the world see you,” she says. “Don’t shrink because you’re in a chair or have a disability.”

Einbender found that dance was synchronous with her sculpture. Dancing is full of movement, full of circles. “I think that’s where my abstraction comes from,” she said. “In my sculpture, I do circles and curves all the time. People always tell me, ‘Your work has such movement.’”

Wheelchair dance is also symbolic, she adds. It’s moving through trauma to a safe space to a life that feels worth living.

Nevertheless, in the beginning Einbender didn’t expect much. She thought it would be like bumper cars. “Bumper chairs,” she said, on second thought.

However, she discovered that her instructors appreciated her graceful movements. They told her that she moved her arms beautifully.

Two months later, they approached her with a surprising proposal. The troupe had an opportunity to dance in the closing ceremonies of the Pan American Games — one of the largest athletic event in the world. Would she join them?

“I was completely floored,” she said. “Never in a million years did I think I was any good. And to perform in public for that many people — I mean, it was televised. It was probably the most transformative thing I’ve ever done. It was so far out of my comfort zone, but I was glad I did it.”

Einbender is currently performing in the troupe’s ambitious new project called The Dewberry Tales. The performers regularly practice at Chestnut Hill Presbyterian Church.

Never one to eschew a challenge, she has even gone surfing on a special adapted board and snow skiing with the PA Center for Adapted Sports. She was one of the first people to try a revolutionary device called the ReWalk Exoskeleton, which allows people with spinal injuries to walk upright.

Einbender has taught disability etiquette — defined as guidelines for respectful, inclusive and professional interaction with people with disabilities. She also has been involved in peer mentoring.

With her own life as an example, other people with disabilities begin to see possibilities, not limitations.

“They see the sense of purpose I have, and it helps them,” she said. “They see that it really helps them move forward, to see that it really can be done — not just surviving and becoming independent enough to do your ADLs [activities of daily living, like bathing, dressing and eating], but to really enjoy. To have a good life.”

To learn more, visit Einbender’s fine arts website, einbendersculpture.com.