Artist Creates Life-Sized Animal Sculptures from Nuts, Bolts, and Scrap Metal

While the majority of us take our discarded flatware and old auto parts to the garbage, Aloha, Oregon artist Brian Mock transforms scrap metal into amazing outdoor sculptures. He gathers used and abandoned components, including screws, nuts, and bolts, and puts them together to create human and animal figures.

Mock has been experimenting with many artistic mediums since he was a young child, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that he fell in love with upcycling art. He learned to weld on his own, which enabled him to imagine his artistic concepts into metal sculptures. Using only reused materials, he is currently building a whole zoo of metallic animals, including dogs, cats, and larger-than-life lions. Mock painstakingly selects each waste metal component to fit the shapes of his animals; for example, flexible metal chains are used for dog tails and huge, curving steel sheets are used for floppy ears.

Giving used, commonplace items a new life as a sculpture is a difficult but rewarding artistic endeavor, according to Mock. “My artwork aims to highlight ingenuity and promote audience participation. My creativity is inspired by audience reactions, which enable me to realize my visions.

View some of Mock’s sculptures made out of scrap metal in the gallery below, and visit his website for more examples of his work.