SPOTLIGHT: Making kinetic sculptures 'hard work'

DECATUR, Ill. — Darren Miller is overwrought and into heavy metal.

None of it has anything to do with his personality or music choices, however. It's what he does with his hands while he actually listens to opera and operates giant antique machines for the milling, shaping, bending and welding of metal into art.

His sculptures twist and writhe like vines or smoke frozen in mid-motion and yet are often far from still. Using a tiny system of bearings, some of his artwork features bladelike petals, fused with color, that catch the wind and actually spin whole sections of the sculpture. The mesmerizing effect can have the top part of the piece gyrating its flowing metal in one direction while the bottom half whirls around the opposite way, dazzling the eye.

"I have finally reached a point where at no two moments is this piece ever exactly alike," explains the Decatur artist as he watches one of his sculptures, a sinew of swoopy metal lines and whirling color, rotating in different directions at the touch of a finger. "Kinetic sculpture, art that moves, that's really where I am headed," adds Miller. "I've been really successful with those."

His art doesn't have to move to move buyers, however. Miller produces a range of organic plant stands that look more alive than the plants they are holding. He does wall hangings, too, that defy easy description but hold the eye with the graceful softness of their hard metal curves and intricate twists.

He sells at art shows and does do some commissioned work. On this particular afternoon, amid a shower of sparks, he's smoothing and polishing the individual copper seeds that will form a 6-foot-tall ear of metallic wheat as per the request of a local company. Everything is hand-cut, hand-shaped, polished, and welded with the kind of meticulous attention God must have given to the first wheat prototype.

Surrounded by drifts of jagged metal shavings and engine oil and dirt in his workshop of hulking machines, some of them dating back to the 1940s and earlier, Miller doesn't try to sugarcoat the creation process of the heavy metal artist. "This is hard work," he says, explaining that his Kleenex is often black when he blows his nose because of contaminants in the air. "It's not sitting out on some sunny afternoon dabbing on paint, which I'm sure would be a lovely experience. It's really hard work in here, and I work seven days a week, six to seven hours a day."