Wire cats leap across the room. Their grace is conveyed with a few spare and simple wires. Fish swim, glinting as they turn.
Jackie Seymour, an administrative assistant in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering, will have some of her 3-D wire art on display at Gallery Three, 3819 N. Third St. in Phoenix.
The one-artist show opens on Friday, May 7, and will be part of "Artlink," a project in downtown Phoenix to promote art.
A shuttle bus will pick up art connoisseurs from Phoenix Central Library and take them to various galleries. Gallery Three is on the north route, said Venus Nguyen, manager of Gallery Three.
"Jackie was referred to us by another artist," Nguyen said. "We like to change our art and have something totally different each month."
"Her work is very unique and experimental," she added.
Seymour said she was glad it was a small gallery, because she will be the only artist and will need to fill the gallery with her sculptures, most of which are only 1- to 2-feet wide.
Seymour expects to display about 75 of her sculptures in the gallery and sell some of them because she is running out of room at home and in her office.
A couple of fish float in Seymour's office. Little bits of blue and green glass sparkle from within the design. Seymour said she found the pieces washed up on a lakeshore in New York. She keeps an eye out for odd bits of material, such as a cluster of glass grapes, which she took apart and used in her own forms.
"Even though I'm not fond of real fish, I like their interesting shapes, they're slightly goofy," she said.
Some pieces, such as the golfer and stork, stand by themselves.
The wire she uses isn't always the same. She picks up a roll of rebar tie wire and immediately starts bending it as she talks. This particular wire is one of her favorites; it will rust and change color after a while. She also uses an annealed 18- or 19-gauge wire.
Her inspiration for this particular art form, she said, was seeing an exhibit of Alexander Calder's work about five years ago. His mobiles and sculptures were popular in the 1950s and 1960s.
"When I saw his art, I thought, 'I can do that,' " she said.
Seymour has been involved with art in some form or another for most of her adult life. She was an art major at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia, Calif., where she first studied costume design and is still interested in it.
"If I'm not doing art, I feel out of sorts. It helps me keep my perspective," she said. "There's a lot more to life than work."
Reach the reporter at bonita.kline@asu.edu.
