Man of Iron

As a child David McLaughlin combed the streets and alleys of Boston’s Back Bay area, looking for things others discarded—bent nails, old trunks, pens, tools, shoeboxes. At 12 when the family moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts, he experienced a “spell of severe separation pains.” He was already deeply involved with finding things and Boston was a treasure trove.

For over 35 years, McLaughlin has been practicing his art—of collecting and turning what he collects into sculptures and assemblages large and small—on the site of an old canning factory in Liberty, just behind the main street of the village center.

He has a summer kitchen, breezy and light-filled, and a winter kitchen, warm and snug and protected. The spaces he lives in are as much works of art as the spaces he works in and the sculptures he fabricates from all kinds of scrap—he hauled away every old window from Cony High School, thousands of steel rings from Brunswick Naval Air Station; he has multiples of door knobs, locks, wooden doors, faucets, hinges, birds’ nests (each individually stacked in small wooden boxes in a dark alcove). Whatever it is, he has created—or hopes to create—a composed space for it, a compilation, a construction, a collection. And each collection speaks to accessibility, to both utility and art.

McLaughlin is a tool man. He is a master welder. He has backhoes and forklifts, boom trucks. He’s been involved in demolition work all over the state. Most recently he hauled home tons of material from 14 acres of rusted buildings in South Portland. He is, as the late artist Richard Lee described him in the film of the Eccentric Artists Tour, “a man who likes to move heavy things.”

His early “pedestrian interests”—cars, the trades—alarmed his parents and so he was sent to prep school to get him “back on the accepted path” to Yale, where he graduated with a degree in fine arts—largely because the sculpture department had the tool he needed to fix his motorcycle. For years he would say he had turned Yale into a trade school. He’s worked on boats in Boston, Miami, the Caribbean; was the technical director of a theater and a designer of store interiors, served in the army reserves, and studied for a year in England, before he headed north where he could collect and create, where he could live in and with his life’s work.

He has designed and built over 50 woodstoves, works of art in themselves. He has also worked on many commercial projects—from fabricating large steel construction beams and creating banisters for home renovations, to designing the gates for the Penobscot Narrows Bridge and figuring out how to implement an architect’s plan for swinging partitions at the Farnsworth.

Recent work has been shown at the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor, the June Fitzpatrick Gallery in Portland, Waterfall Arts in Belfast, and the Ames Mill in Richmond.

When did you start collecting?

I was a collector in preschool, literally. There was so much that fascinated me. I lived on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay [Boston]. The streets, the alleys, life was so dense, and so much was thrown away, just left.

Like what?

Mechanical things. Tools. I can remember finding an axe and being incredibly stimulated by the idea that an axe was such an important tool, that a person could go into the woods and build a house. I found firearms, old coins, bent nails. It was easy for me to see value in things that were thrown away.

Can you tell us about a specific find you remember?

I found an old shoebox with the entire contents of a desk—the pencils, the big spring clips, huge erasers, fountain pens, and blotters. I brought it all to school and put it in my desk. The teacher said, “You have to get rid of that stuff. You have to clean your desk.” Instead I put it in order. The next day she walked right by. That was a memorable moment when I realized the pleasure of putting things in order.

Is there anything you can’t use?

Very little. If you’re making art, what can’t you use? If you have a collection of springs—I think of springs because there’s a spring in back of you—the more springs you have the more fortunate the composition is going to be.

This property itself seems like a work of art.

You’re generous to make that observation. I was deeply moved by Joseph Cornell’s work [American artist, 1903–1972]. In some ways this entire set of buildings is a big Joseph Cornell box. The arrangements of the collections are in themselves the work. Some of that has broken down. The system has been weakened by having to move things around to make repairs. As an organic record of this slow accretion of related or not related objects, they are definitely compositions.

On some level, both in your collections and in the individual sculptures, it seems to be an architect-engineer at work.

Given my sensibility—you’re very correct in seeing that—some advisor could have said, “Train as an engineer,” and I think I would have appreciated that. That sort of thing suits me—how to figure out ways of making things work on a practical level. At times it gives me great delight to confine myself to the practical. It used to be that I would put the same consideration, the same sensitivity into everything I do, even the making of a tool, a jig. Sometimes I try to be too much.

Tools have been important, formative, to you at all stages of your life—childhood, young adulthood, Yale, every step along the way.

Well, you have something in your mind. You can’t get there directly. You can’t just materialize things. So far we can’t describe something and have it appear. The real character of material objects is pure energy anyway. Meanwhile we have to work through the direct process of hand on tool. So for me the tool thing is very big and I can feel very keenly the deprivation of good tools.

Are some of your projects, your pieces, issue-driven—-a theme, a concept?

Some. There’s been a whole series—the post-Apocalypse series; the big piece up in Bangor [a recent exhibition at the University of Maine Museum of Art] is one. I made at least six or seven of these carts a peddler might tow around after the great collapse. The cart that’s up at the Davistown Museum, I made that for the Taking Panes show that Richard Lee put together last year. Seventy-five artists interpreted large wooden sashes that were taken out of a mill in Richmond. It was probably the most vigorous art exhibit that I’d seen in Maine.

Your work is a huge range of sizes, incorporating many different materials. Do you work in a similar way on everything?

Yes, I like to work from the finished image backwards. I search about for the materials that would get me close to that image and then the channel of discovery shifts into what’s possible—the concept, the rough drawings. And as every artist will tell you, the piece starts to reveal itself at some point.

Is there something that you very much still want to accomplish with your work?

If I have my health, I would choose to continue this project so that I could bring the concept of these buildings, this property, these collections, into a figure that anyone could understand, so anyone could appreciate the utility of the space, so that anyone could have an idea here and do something about it. Like the ultimate art factory.

Two words come to mind—a sense of vulnerability and survivability.

Yes. Obviously there’s the ever-present personal issue of how to grow old gracefully. I’m jealous of myself as a young man.

Does this vulnerability manifest itself in your work?

I think we could find a level of melancholy. There’s sadness of what is lost and what is about to be lost and I feel that quite exquisitely.