Breathing new life into scrap metal
20 February 2020
John Brown is a sculptor known internationally for transforming everyday waste metal into astonishingly realistic animal forms. Having studied Fine Art Painting and Metal Casting and Welding, his works have multidisciplinary qualities that transcend ordinary expectations of metal art.
Brown says "I’ve been to art school a couple of times, the first time, I dropped out after two years. After moving around a little, I dropped out again from society and ended up living in a tipi." To all intents and purposes, I decided to give up on art. However, I noticed that I would still construct sculptures out of items that I was just living with, and it soon became evident to me that I wasn’t going to be able to stop.
“My work is about connection to the natural world. A lot of the material gets pushed aside in the wake of human progress and lots of animals get pushed into the extremities of our habitat. They are occupying the same spaces. Often you can see them around these waste piles. There’s a natural connection between the two things.
“Effectively what I’m doing is creating studies from observations of these animals. I aim to produce a likeness as well as I can, as close to that thing as I can and that is when my medium is working at its best, when I’m able to make the thing look like it’s living. To elevate it above the nature of the materials.
“Wild animals have this uncanny kind of presence, they have something which just stops you in your tracks. If you’re sensitive enough to see it, it will just arrest you, and you have to stop and look at it and just notice, and it’s just this wonderful notion that this private existence of these things goes on beyond what we can see.”
The Scrap Metal Artist
Artist John Brown, breaths new life into scrap metal.
Brown's work has been included in many collections internationally. It has been exhibited with Andy Warhol photographs, sold alongside Armand Guillaumin paintings and displayed with fine antiques.
For Brown, his work is much more meaningful than just running a business, he says “In Wales, there are places you can go and lose yourself in the wild and really have an experience of the natural world. I think that has been hugely formative in my work. To me it’s much more than just a business. It’s much more than just something that I do for money. I would be doing it if there wasn’t money involved. I’d be doing it if there was no space to do it, I’d be doing it some way or other.
“When I make a piece, for me it really is about the process of making it, and absorption in that, to the point where the piece, the finished thing is almost secondary to the process of creating. I tend not to put deadlines on my work, and I tend not to pressurise myself, until I feel I’m happy with it, until I feel the journey has been walked effectively.
“For me it’s about taking scrap metal and not letting it out of the workshop until it becomes that animal.”
Brown links the work to his connection to the natural world, “I’ve been in Wales for about 15 years now. In Wales it’s a little bit more wild, particularly here in West Wales. There’s less control from human making placed on the environment. ‘You’re never far away from nature here. You can hear the birds singing, and if at any moment I need a break I can go outside, you’re instantly connected with it again. My work is about connection to the natural world, and I think you can’t synthesise that, it has to be authentic.”
Brown says of his work, “For me in my work, the greatest joy or excitement is not the finishing of a piece. For me the exciting part is when I can leave something somewhere, and people can then start to interact with it. And I think the pinnacle of that is if people are able to perceive the energy that’s been put into it. People pick up on that energy, the life force that’s been put into it. And for some inanimate object to do that, something that is just a construction to affect people emotionally, or make them think about their lives or their losses, I think that is just staggering really, that my emotional energy picked up on by other people may inspire them, I think that’s tremendous. Nothing thrills me more, that’s when it comes full circle.”
