Artist welds new life into old metal

Story and photo by Sophia Kidd
The Portland Upside
August 2009

Joe Warren’s life-sized elk sculpture is being displayed at Love Art! Gallery, 8036 SE 13th Av, Portland, OR 503.954.2656 (photo by Sophia Kidd)

Let’s just suppose an elk is not an elk, nor an owl an owl. See instead a can opener expired before its time. See a fleet of door hinges rather than a giraffe’s neck, chains as tails, plates as pelvic girdles, and bolts as knee caps. Each of Joe Warren’s found-metal-object animal sculptures represents an historical slice of Portland’s material culture.

Joe’s life-sized elk is breathtaking. It’s haunches are made of trowel heads, light sockets, horseshoes, and fleur-de-lis ornaments rounded by a saw blade. The elk’s tail is a noble and heavy door knocker, its thigh signified by a double headed wrench and crowbars. Hammer heads make for ligaments while multiple bicycle chains, cut in cascading lengths, perfectly simulate the elk’s beard. Where, on rare occasion, metal parts do not naturally fit the form, Joe manipulates them with barely perceptible bends. The parts are as significant as the larger composite figure.

The body of his giraffe elicits poetry, with a star shape mid-neck, as if to celebrate the ecstasy of recycling wasted matter into art. To capture the giraffe’s exact curves, Joe chose door hinges, and many of them. The hinges contiguously crawl up the neck with slight lilts left and right. Around the eyes are perky eyelashes made of nails. The giraffe’s tail is a stroke of genius, it’s long, heavy, link chain hanging down between the animal’s rear legs with a tuft of bicycle-chain strands anchored to a large metal hook. Such biomorphic nuances impart the breath of life into the sculpture.

And the artist has a sense of humor.

His owl is made, according to its placard, “from cast off plow parts, pry bars, bearings, clippers, rakes, etc. She even swivels her head—Hoo!”

Two owls from the series, displayed recently at Coffee People, were sold in June for $225 a piece, a small price for a whole new way of viewing our material culture vis-à-vis the animal kingdom. And the sleek recycled creatures are really cute.

Joe started as a writer. While getting his master’s degree in creative non-fiction, the urge arose to get his hands on something more concrete. He started taking a class in welding at Portland Community College (PCC) and when he finished, he decided to audit the class over and over again. He created his own welding community: regular contact with other metal workers, advice from knowledgeable instructors, and access to good equipment.

As for his wonderful sense of anatomical form? According to the artist, he was self-taught, getting heavily into the Internet, downloading every online animal he could find. Joe has even researched footage of animals in movement. With this knowledge and his own experience of moving parts and wholes, he began the creative birthing process.

With a real passion for metal talk, the artist marvels over old tools made with stoic standards. To find them, Joe scours old mining grounds, scrap yards, pawnshops, and estate sales. The old tools he finds at estate sales are often left behind by people who knew the value of craftsmanship, he says. And to bring the whole process up to date he also relies on craigslist to solicit parts.

Joe also marvels at the tools made cheaply by foreign labor for thrift markets, objects that have, according to him, “used up their primary purposes, breaking way ahead of their time,” An example is the shiny can opener forming part of the giraffe’s torso. Almost everything else on the animal is rusted. Joe prefers rusted parts because they aren’t galvanized or coated with toxins. Rust-free parts, when welded, released their sealants as toxic gas. The process not only sickens him, but also indicates what galvanizing toxins do as they oxidize in the environment.

While he kept on at PCC for awhile, his commute to school got old. Wanting to make less of a carbon footprint, he started looking for a creative space closer to home. His research turned up Shop People. Founded and operated by Richard Ellison and Rebekah Dresky, Shop People is a thriving network of artists and craftspeople who share space, tools, and ideas.

As an environmentalist as well as an artist and community activist, Joe Warren fits right in and today he is one of Shop People’s brightest rising stars.
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Stop by to see Joe Warren’s giraffe, elk, owl, and other works, on display at Love Art! Gallery, 8036 SE 13th Av, Portland, OR 503.954.2656

Sophia Kidd is a free-lance writer for various local, national, and international publications. Recently based in Portland, she begins reading this fall for her M.A. in Classical Chinese Literature at Sichuan University. She wishes for positive civic journalism to thrive in The Portland Upside.