Turn Discarded Metal Into Priceless Art

My name is Owen. I am a trained welder, and then I was in art school for a couple of years. I always wanted to be a woodcarver, but I went into metalwork instead. For me, that's what I really enjoy about this work, working with unconventional materials and reusing them and reimagining what they could be. I always knew I wanted to be an artist. It was, I think, even pretty quick getting to, like, once I could sell my work that I was making, I was like, oh, this is as viable as anything else these days. Often I work with people's grandparents' tools or heirloom objects that they've inherited that they want to see kind of reimagined and turned into something that they will display as a piece of artwork. People borrow from different aspects of history all the time, and across, like, all artistic mediums, everything is referential to the past. You dig deep into these different archives and different historical sources to give structure to your ideas. It allows you to play with history in a way that discarded objects. Often these things are stored in garages or just kind of thrown away when they have such a rich and interesting history to them. There's a lot to see in these different materials.