Artist Spins Sculptures From Steel

In school, Devin Mack was always that fidgety kid bending paper clips in the back of the room.

Now 33, the Southland Hills resident has moved on from paper clips to wire sculptures ranging from back-scratchers to six-foot tall statues.

His fascination with wire and passion for the human figure began at Ithaca College, where he majored in cinema and photography.

"I took a lot of drawing classes," he said. "I'm particularly interested in figure drawing and then one day a professor pretty much handed me a roll of wire and told me to make one in three dimensions, so the wire sort of sprang from that."

Now his studio, in the basement of a home he rents out in Remington, is filled with his wire sculptures and sketches. With the benefit of a quiet, bright space, Mack uses only his hands and several pairs of pliers to turn Slinky-like spools of stainless steel and copper wire into works of art.

On weekends, he travels to craft shows and galleries to sell his wares. He also has small sculptures for sale in gift shops at the and American Visionary Art Museum.

Where does he find all that wire?

"Anywhere I can, really," he said, including a New Jersey wholesale vendor. "I do find wire on the streets, like second-hand stuff and find coils that electricians don't use and that sort of thing."

And once he gets it, the process is one part sketching, one part anatomy class.

"What I'll do is I'll start with the skeleton and the skeleton can be malleable," he said. "It's poseable, and so what I'll do is I'll take that and, sort of like an action figure, I can pose the sculpture before I finish it, so I can find a pleasing sort of pose for it then I'll go back and add details like hair, fingers and the like."

Those sculptures can take the form of a mermaid rising from the water, a female Roman-style centurion, dancers paused in mid-air or acrobats performing high-flying flips. A small sculpture or trinket could take hours, but his life-size sculptures can take weeks or months to finish.

And believe it or not, rust is not a problem.

"If it's meant for outdoor use I will use different mats, but the copper gains a patina," he said. 

An advantage Mack enjoys is that he can make his sculptures anywhere, from a barstool to the front of his to a cramped coach seat while flying cross-country.

"I go through airports all the time with this stuff. I get a lot of funny looks and occasionally they will stop me and inspect my luggage, because a big dense spool of metal is worrisome to them," he said. "I've made some of my best work sitting on long airplane flights."

And even his 6-year-old son Oliver is in on the act.

"He does help from time to time," he said. "He helps me bend stuff and I have some tasks that he can do. But he's learning."

For more about Mack's work, visit his website.