Venue: 1495 S Black Ridge Dr, St. George, UT 84770 Hours: 12–5 PM Mon–Sat & by appointment Phone: (435) 656-3377
Fibonacci Fine Arts Company

From demolition piles to flight: a St George sculptor's rebar birds

In a sun-bleached yard on the edge of St George, Utah, where red sandstone cliffs lean toward the Virgin River, a sculptor is turning the bones of forgotten buildings into pieces that almost lift off the ground. Sheets of bent rebar, twisted wire and the occasional forgotten nail are welded, heated and coaxed into abstract birds that read at once as sketches in air and as stubborn survivors of the desert itself.

For Australian readers who follow contemporary metalwork in places like Hobart's industrial-edge studios or the converted-foundry galleries of Collingwood, the conversation about re-use, landscape and feathered creatures will feel immediately familiar. From a galah rendered in welded plate on a New South Wales sheep station to a sulphur-crested cockatoo pulled from scrap in a Brunswick backyard, the antipodean appetite for making birds from cast-off metal is well established. The St George practice sits inside that lineage while pulling its material straight from the bulldozed suburbs of the American Southwest.

Where the steel comes from

Most of the rebar in this studio began life as reinforcement inside the poured concrete walls and driveways of Las Vegas-adjacent subdivisions, schools and parking structures. When those buildings come down, the steel is usually trucked to a yard in southern Nevada and sold by the tonne to be melted down in far-off mills. A modest salvage arrangement with two regional demolition contractors now routes a percentage of that material back into the artist's hands in raw, bent lengths, free of charge apart from the fuel to collect it.

The result is a supply of bar stock that already carries the history of a place. Scratches from formwork, the orange ghost of concrete dust, the slight bow of a length that once held up a school corridor: all of it survives into the finished piece. Visitors walking into the Fibonacci Fine Arts gallery often spend a long moment looking for these traces, leaning in close to read the surface the way one might read a geological core sample taken from a Pilbara iron ore body.

From yard bird to welded line

The fabrication itself happens outdoors for much of the year, which matters for the work. The artist cuts rebar on a heavy band saw, then heats sections with an oxy-acetylene torch until they glow a soft cherry red. At that temperature, the steel becomes almost compliant, a far cry from the rigid ribbing hidden inside a slab. A small track bender, the kind more common on rural fencing jobs around Winton or Cunnamulla, does the heavy curves; finer gestures are made freehand with a hammer over a swage block.

Each abstract bird begins as a single length of bar, chosen for the way it wants to bend, then grows outward in welded increments. There is no maquette and no small study; the drawings happen in steel. This approach gives the sculptures a kind of decision-mapped memory, since every joint records the moment of choice, and undoing one costs more than starting over. Australian sculptors working in similar idioms, from the Perth-based steel fabricators exhibiting at the Mundaring Arts Centre to the rail-and-foundry practitioners attached to the Toowoomba regional scene, will recognise the discipline of committing to a line and living with it.

Reading the forms

The birds themselves are not portraits. There is no attempt at a vermilion flycatcher or a peregrine silhouette, and yet most viewers identify the subject within seconds. The trick lies in a series of compressed cues: a hooked beak line, a sudden flare of tail feathers, a wing-tip that has been allowed to droop just slightly under its own weight. The economy of information forces the eye to complete the picture, and the rebar's grid of muscle and bone does the rest.

Colour is held to a minimum. A thin layer of clear sealant slows the rust, but most pieces are allowed to deepen into a dark oxide brown that recalls the patina of weathered agricultural machinery. A handful of works have been left to rust more aggressively, picking up the russet of the surrounding cliffs, and these read almost as line drawings made in soil. The connection to the iron-rich earth of the Pilbara, or the red dirt that stains boots from Broome to Bendigo, is not lost on visiting Australian curators.

A practice rooted in place

St George sits at the seam of the Mojave, the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau, and the work wears that geography openly. The hard horizontals of the desert horizon push the sculptures into vertical, ascending forms. Even a piece hung against a wall feels as though it is climbing out of a wash or launching from a low juniper. The Mountain West has a long tradition of art that refuses to separate craft from landscape, and this studio carries that thread forward into a more industrial vocabulary.

The work also travels well. The Fibonacci Fine Arts gallery has shipped pieces to collectors in Brisbane, Adelaide and Fremantle, and the smaller wall-hung birds have proven particularly popular with interior designers working on coastal projects where a sense of dry, open country is wanted indoors. Several pieces are currently on view in St George through the autumn exhibition season, accompanied by a short film documenting the salvage-to-sculpture process.

How to bring a rebar bird home

If the idea of a magpie forged from the bones of a Nevada strip mall, or a galah pulled from an old Queensland fence line, sparks something, the gallery is open to commissions and conversations from collectors anywhere in the world. Reach out through the Fibonacci Fine Arts website and start a sketch in steel of your own.