Bryan Slade fully believes “you use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul”.
It’s a quote he borrowed from Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw to explain how it feels to think up and bring to life original artworks made of scrap metal in his home workshop in north Shepparton.
Lines between art and craft are often blurred, but the general rule is that art is an emotional manifestation, while craft uses learned skills and techniques to create or duplicate something from a set of instructions.
Mr Slade’s work could be a combination, except nobody ever taught him how to weld. He worked it out himself.
Looking around his workshop, grey lead sketches are pinned to the walls. They are imagined art, immortalised on paper so the idea doesn’t slip away, pushed out of mind by the constant flow of new ones before he can create it.
There are boxes and baskets of scrap metal — some sourced from junk yards, some gifted from places such as trucking businesses that no longer need the old cogs out of their truck gearboxes — some already categorised into groups with most of the items needed to execute a particular design.
But the most important ingredients are Mr Slade’s mind’s eye and skill.
Several of his finished pieces adorn the shelves, hang from the roof and decorate his garden, and it’s a feast for an industrial art-lover’s eyes.
Think lamps with cogs as bases, moving propellers, historic pressure gauges encased in metal on the stalks and colanders as lamp shades.
Think giant bees with bodies made using 380 washers and two bulging bugged-out eyes that were once strainers or a sculpture of a determined-looking emu, whose hair was created with more than 40m of wire in different gauges to get the realistic effect of gradating thicknesses.
There’s a dragon made with more than 1000 15mm squares Mr Slade painstakingly cut from flat steel plate, each welded together because he said that was the only way it made it look authentically like a reptile’s skin.
Mr Slade gave the body of an old Kenwood truck’s air tank new life when he turned it into a Volkswagen Kombi firepit.
The married father of three adult men explained that sometimes the piles of metal spoke to him and gave him the ideas for his pieces, and other times he had ideas for his pieces and then searched his supplies to find the bits and bobs that would work to bring it to life, as he pulled out a box and drew a silencer off a lawnmower out of it and asked me if I saw a face.
Mr Slade has been tinkering, welding his sculptures and creating his art since he retired almost two years ago.
During his working life, he drove dump trucks in a quarry, worked in a hospital, as a cameraman in the television industry, and at a BMW dealership, but he had only ever welded as a hobby.
“I’ve just been a Jack (of all trades),” Mr Slade said.
“Just playing around like boys do in the shed; you had a welder in the corner for fixing stuff, not for creating.
“Maybe because retirement means you haven’t got work and you’re lucky enough to have yourself set up and don’t owe people things anymore, you can just tinker around and get the head fired up.”
Making lamps, Mr Slade also had to have some basic wiring knowledge.
“I was a trade assistant for an electrician for a few years, so you learn the basics,” he said.
“All my stuff gets (tested and) tagged, so they’re completely safe.
“I don’t want to bear the cost of anyone’s house burning down and it’s just common courtesy to do it.”
He’s even wired a lamp to American standards to send a custom piece abroad, such is his widespread customer base.
Every piece Mr Slade makes is one of a kind. If someone commissions him to make a sculpture based on one of his previous creations, he tells them that he can, but it will be different in some way.
“Things are often made in third-world countries, exploiting cheap labour, ordered in by the thousands and your neighbour’s got one, he’s got one and they’ve got one, and 25 other people in the street have got one,” he said.
“Not everything has to come off a production line.
“It’s good to find stuff that fits people’s thoughts and it’s not necessarily what’s in a coffee table book.”
While home artists (as opposed to career artists) often engage in their crafts as a labour of love, making little profit from it, Mr Slade finds reward in bringing joy to those who “get” his art and helping people open their minds while each interprets his creations differently.
“That’s not purposeful at all,” he said as he pointed towards a piece of his garden art.
“But the purpose is it’s actually causing some thought, and something that provokes a thought is a good thing.”
Tongala-born Mr Slade is also an avid cyclist with what he describes as a 300km-a-week “addiction” to the sport. He believes keeping both the body and mind active in retirement might be the key to enjoying it mostly, but also to stop him from growing old overnight.
A music-lover, who has different playlists for different moods — featuring artists ranging from James Blake to System of a Down — that he listens to while welding, is trading metal work for metal music later this week when he heads to Melbourne to see Perth band Karnivool perform live.
“I’m a bit weird for 67 (years old),” Mr Slade said.
Aren’t all the greatest artists?
Mr Slade’s ever-changing collection can be viewed at the Violet Town market each month or on his Instagram page: www.instagram.com/junkjazzed