To the average person, junk metal looks, well, like junk: old shovels, rusty watering cans, cam shaft bearings, bent bike frames and transmission covers.
But when Debbi Rhodes scours the metal bins, she envisions chests and faces, belly buttons and fish bodies, and sometimes she even sees a scrotum.
Old metal pieces that Rhodes finds at the dump, inside recycle bins and on the side of the road speak to her. She hears them, sees them in her mind’s eye as distinct body parts. Then, she puts them together, creating metal people, animals and an occasional space cowboy.
“Sometimes I think I do this because I’m not very social, so I’m making all my friends,” Rhodes joked.
Don’t think for a moment that Rhodes is weird. She is a down-to-earth, practical woman who combines the skill to wield a welding torch with an offbeat talent for turning metal into art.
About 20 of Rhodes’ capricious metal creatures are among the more whimsical offerings at this weekend’s Camano Island Studio Tour. This is the ninth year for the free, self-guided tour that opens at 10 a.m. today and wraps up at 5 p.m. Sunday.
At Rhodes’ studio and home, her metal creations, the daredevil boys on the old tricycle, the red crab, the “All Talk” politician who is also part clown and the pastel-painted Mr. Happy Go Lucky, beguile visitors with their bright colors and jovial expressions.
At the same time, these creatures can cause constant double-takes as we try to discern which discarded metal part we’re looking at. Then it comes to us. “Oh yeah, that is an old plow head.”
Of her representational art, Rhodes said she has always thought oddly about things, always figured a thing’s usefulness could be ever changing.
“That’s why I never buy anything. There’s huge amounts of metal out there and granted, it can be melted down and made into something else, but that requires a lot more energy,” Rhodes said, standing among her garden art in the front yard of her cozy Camano Island home.
She called her process of creating art from found objects “rethought art” because the original shape of what she finds really doesn’t change; it’s just rethought as something else.
“And the challenge for me is can I do it,” Rhodes said. “Will it work. And when it works, it’s just joyous to me. The joy is in can I do it.”
Rhodes, 42, learned to weld about 15 years ago, when she got divorced and learned the trade to make money. Her first job was repairing barges. Later, she realized that she could, indeed, make art by welding when she created three dolphin figures holding up a table top.
Today, Rhodes still welds at her Mount Vernon job. But every day after work, she heads over to the Skagit Valley dump and looks for “parts” – metal pieces that will become legs, fingers, hair, eyeballs.
Rhodes confessed that she might own 50 shovel heads. Still, whenever she finds a shovel head, she takes it home because you just never know.
“I always worry that if I don’t take it, the metal gods will get mad at me and I won’t get another shovel,” Rhodes said. “And I use a lot of shovels. They have the shape of chests, bellies, shoulders and backs.”
In the metal storage area and studio of her home, Rhodes does have an impressive collection of shovel heads, and also farm equipment, old bicycle parts, and just about every metal automotive part you could think of.
Out of this pile, her comical garden characters emerge. These three-dimensional art pieces take a certain amount of engineering to work. There’s planning down to the tiniest detail, like what metal part would make the best fingers. And then the finished pieces are carefully masked with tape as Rhodes clothes her creatures in spray paint.
Though meticulous about her work, Rhodes is also fond of her creatures and hopes this weekend’s studio tour helps find good homes for her friends.
“It’s the reason we make art, it’s for people,” Rhodes said. “We want them to show up and get a kick out of it.”
Arts writer Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3424 or goffredo@heraldnet.com.
“Il Pecoraio”
“Red Tide”
“The Shy Giant”
“Tres Colores”
Debbi Rhodes at work in her studio.
“Powerhouse”
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