"The artist's world is limitless.
It can be found anywhere,
far from where he
lives
or a few feet away.
It is always on his doorstep."
Paul Strand
Cory Holmes, of Havre, Montana,
is a Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway conductor with a penchant for welding
scrap metal into art. Many of his pieces, the majority of which he places himself, mysteriously appear on fence posts around
the country. Most of those can be found along the long, lonely highways in a wide area of Montana, where he has become known
as the Fence Post Bandit.
"Electric Man"
I've been hoarding scrap iron for better than four
decades; never with a particular thought of selling it though. In fact, I don't
believe I ever have sold any steel or iron as scrap. I don't just gather and
collect any arbitrary metal; that would be both redundant and boring. I hand
pick interesting forms, with unique shapes and histories.
"Model A Horse"
My scrap pile is between 60 and 80 tons at this point.
Each piece of scrap played a part in the history of this nation: the springs
and hardware from old buggies and farm wagons, the moldboard plows, cycle bar
mowers, and horse drawn combines. There were old pieces and parts from oil
rigs, pipelines, seismograph outfits and so on. I had railroad parts from
hardware from the telegraphs, parts of steam locomotives and various sundry
parts from tracks, switches, cabooses and box cars. There were spent military
cartridges, helmets, bayonets and various hardware. Interesting stuff....but
what does one do with it? Well I do sculptures. I have been doing metal sculptures for about
twelve years, as far as the fence art sculptures go, I have been doing them
about ten years now.
One day I was reading some
farm journal and there was an article that said there were 35 million fence
posts in Montana. I thought hmmmm, I wonder how they know that? Do they have
fence post census takers? Not too long after I read the article I had to take a
trip to Glendive and as I drove along the endless prairie I thought, gee,
somebody ought to decorate around here and make this drive a little more
interesting. So, I figured why not me? I'll just whip up some stuff and honk it
on the top of fence post. And viola, fence art was born.
"Monster Face"
Now, ponder this for a
moment. A farmer is seeding his field for the umpteenth time. Out of the corner
of his eye he sees a strange apparition perched on a fence post his father set
forty years ago as a teenager. "What the heck is that?" he thinks and
parks his tractor trundles over and takes a look. He stares a while, scratches
his head and goes back to farming. Pretty soon, over coffee at the grain
elevator he asks his neighbor if he has seen any weird stuff on fence posts.
Strangely, his neighbor says yes, he has a thing on one of his fence post too.
What are they? No one knows. Who put them there? No clue. What do they mean? No
idea. So they ponder the mystery. They talk about it. We have social
interaction between neighbors; perhaps not a bad idea in this age of wireless
anonymity.
In order to do sculptures
I have to bend and shape and fabricate all this stuff. My specific method of
making sculptures is called the direct metal technique. That means that I have
to arrange, shape, forge, grind and polish all things by hand. It also means
each one of my pieces is an original and a one of a kind. I use a number of different
fabrication methods in making my sculptures and fence art, I use a coal forge
and trip hammer when I have to do blacksmithing. I also weld with a combination
of gasses, a method rapidly becoming obsolete but sometimes necessary to
achieve a certain look or effect.
"Spikes and Springs"
I thought I would probably
quit when I expended my original 50 or 60 tons of scrap iron but an interesting
thing happened. Once people heard what I was doing they started bringing me
more scrap. And some really interesting stuff too. I found a 200 lb camshaft
from a locomotive someone had left in my truck, buckets of square nuts from the
1920s, and huge rivets from a disassembled bridge. The list goes on, and so
does fence art production.
"Ode to Maud Muller"
Near as I can tell I have
in the neighborhood of 700 pieces of fence art in 17 states and two Canadian
provinces. In actuality I cannot be certain the people who I gave fence art to
actually put them up as they said they would and claimed they did. I, however,
have personally put them up in 11 states and two Canadian Provinces. I would
have put a couple up in Hawaii as well but airline regulations make this almost
impossible.
I never ask permission - of
course, in a perfect world I would. I try to avoid the unpleasantness of
explaining what manner of unbridled weirdness I am committing to some farmer's
fence post. So almost without fail my fence arts are placed in pretty remote
places.
"Longhorn Cow"
I like to put them on the
skyline whenever possible because they are easier to see. The single most
important part is the fencepost. It has to be a substantial post and
unfortunately most post are not. Railroad tie fencepost are king. I try not to
place them on brace post next to gates because I don’t want it to snag a
farmer’s header on a combine or swather. I try not to place them in near
proximity to houses unless somebody specifically asks me to. I have put a
goodly number of fence art in national forest, but, to be honest they are
difficult to see because of the trees. The upside is they don't get stolen
nearly as often as the prairie variety.
Thievery can be a problem
but it does not bother me as much as it confuses me. I don't understand why
people take them but sometimes they do. I can only speculate that sometimes
they are offended that someone put something up on a fence because they own the
fence, or because it’s just too far out of their realm of normalness, or maybe
because they took a shine to it and wanted it in their back yard.
"Hands and Tire Wrench"
I give anybody that wants
a fence art, a fence art. But I prefer if they come and get it from me at my
home, or wait until it’s convenient for me to deliver it. Yes I do sell my
work. But not fence art, it's free.
"Fence Chicken"
Of all the reasons Cory gives
for creating fence art: boredom, wanderlust, cheap mindless entertainment, lack
of adult supervision, frustration with deadlines, disgust with 50% commission
fees at art galleries, lack of parameters, love of the creative process,
potential longevity, lack of expected political correctness, ultimate freedom
of choice, shock value, an excuse to travel to unseen places and the challenge
to convey an idea or concept in a brief moment, he says, "Mostly I guess I did it because it was
really fun."
"What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. "
John
Updike
Cory's words here were taken from an
interview that appeared on the Glacier Electric Cooperative, Inc.
web site. Click HERE to read the complete article.
To view more of Cory's
fantastic fence art:
