This story was last updated in November 2020.
An Iowa-based artist is using his creativity and skill to create incredible metal sculptures from reclaimed materials such as discarded cycle chains and sprockets.
“I greatly enjoy bringing life and beauty to what is often considered to be junk,” Drew Evans, from Marion,
told My Modern Met.
The talented artist began welding more than a decade ago and has experience in various welding processes such as structural shielded metal arc welding (SMAW), food-grade stainless gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW), and dual shield gas metal arc welding (GMAW), according to his
website, Chainbreaker Studio. Having been into the welding field, it helps Evans to create detailed sculptures.
Evans uses his passion for cycling, nature, and metalwork to give a new life to these disused cycle parts.
“I love working with scrap bicycle chains and sprockets in particular for a plethora of reasons,” Evans
said. “[I]ncluding the fact that they are highly conducive to geometric designs, and they come in a variety of metallic finishes that often take on colorful patinas when heated.”
Additionally, Evans further shared that while he works on transforming these metal works into art, he thinks of the long and arduous journeys these cycles would have taken their bikers on and all the stories they would recall only “if they could talk.”
Evans, who has been running a bicycle mechanic service since 2019, likes to create tree sculptures. In fact, the first one that he crafted was a birthday present for a client’s father who worked at a local bike shop. Making use of the scrap metal that he discovered as trash at the same shop, Evans made an incredible 11-inch-by-15-inch tree model. The impressive sculpture comprises bike chains for the branches and trunk, whilst the foliage consists of bike chains.
Following the marvelous structure, Evans began creating more trees of different sizes and foliage finishes. However, apart from nature-inspired sculptures, the creative artist crafts sculptures on the human body, planets, abstract patterns, and more.
Recently, Evans completed an elaborative figurative sculpture of a woman that weighed a whopping 20 pounds (approx. 9 kg) that stands at 36 inches by 16 inches. On sharing an image of the beautiful sculpture on his Instagram
page, Evans reveals he looks forward to doing more figurative sculptures.
In one of his
posts, Evans shared how he puts his heart into each piece to create such inspiring artwork. “I’m not kidding when I say I put my heart into what I do,” Evans began. “When embark on an inspired work of art, I obsess. I drop everything else and devote myself to the work.”
He further adds: “In this mode, the sole purpose of eating, hydrating, and sleeping is to make my body able to make art.”
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