Creating art out of scrap metal, from sunflowers to a sculpture in another land

Walk onto Al Simm’s property in Upper Falmouth and you could be forgiven for thinking you’re at an impromptu scrapyard. There are cut up steel oil tanks, stacks of shovel heads, shelves full of rusty angle iron, and empty propane tanks propped up against each other. Look around a bit more though, and you can see there is more going on here than first meets the eye. The patterns cut out of one of the oil tanks form thistle leaves on a larger-than-life sculpture in front of Simm’s workshop. Those shovel heads? They’re the base for Simm’s incredible all-metal great blue herons. Metal flowers and plants abound in the yard too: poppies, bullrushes, roses.

Simm was laid off from industrial metalwork in the early 2000s, and, he says, “That’s when things started to happen here at the house.” He is a member of Craft Nova Scotia, has work regularly shown in galleries, and was commissioned to build and install a stunning First World War memorial called the Canada Gate at Passchendaele, Belgium. Still, Simm isn’t quite comfortable calling himself an artist. He says he still does “a lot of normal welding stuff,” and he adds, “I am definitely a metal worker. The artist thing? I don’t know. But a lot of people say that now.”

 

I used to work for RKO, in the steel industry, and before that I worked at Cherubini’s for three years. At RKO I got hired to drive the truck, just the one-tonne. I was painting after that, putting primer on every bit of stuff that goes out of there. That lasted a week or two. And then buddy said, “You’re way, way above this stuff.” So I started fabricating right then. Just small stuff: window frames, stuff for concrete buildings, brick lintels. The way the industry was, we’d get laid off in winter and I’d play hockey and go skiing. And in between all that, I worked at a place called Heritage Memorials, which is a granite company. I got offered a full-time job and did that for five years, but that was not a good spot for someone with asthma. Very dusty. A very wet dust. Then I went back to the steel industry, but after 9/11 a lot of the industry moving stuff to the US got shut down.

I got into a business development program—one of the ones where you had to be unemployed. Our meeting place was Rawdon Gold Mines Hall, and one night this woman who was also in the course says to me, “Do you think you could make a handrail for my mother?” Well, I was sure I could do that. She wanted to have bearded irises on it. I didn’t really know an iris from a hole in the ground. I just knew it wasn’t a sunflower. So I went to the dollar store and picked up one of those plastic irises, and that’s what I started with. I started to make something similar to the look of that.

One of several eagles Simm created; making roses for a signpost.

There’s a place I would go every day and have lunch, and one of the women working there was big-time into gardening. I brought her in an iris that I’d made, and she said, “Change this part here.” It was actually the part that sticks out in between the two leaves—whatever the terminology is for that. I call it the beard. Anyway, she said, just change that, make it a little narrower, skinnier. So the next day, I took it back and she said that’s perfect. And so that’s how it happened. That’s how I started doing metal flowers.

I didn’t have colour on anything then. It took a long time to get colour involved. A friend of mine down over the hill who has three or four pieces said she wanted to buy my newly developed poppies, but she said, “Why don’t you try putting colour on these poppies?” I had a red paint I really liked, and I put that on, with clear coat over top of it. And then it was like, oh, you’re into a whole new ball of wax now! That was at least six or seven years ago now, and I’ve done colour ever since.

My blue herons are five feet tall or so. Almost the whole bird and the substructure underneath is all used material. For the body shape itself, I start out with legs and I usually beat them up a little bit to make them look rough, because the heron’s legs look rough. I bend them to have a double-angle shape to them, like they’re moving. Then I weld that to a round-mouth shovel, upside down. That’s how I start the body.

The neck is a spring-tooth harrow, which is an implement a lot of farmers here use; and this part will break off, and then it’s no good to them anymore. I went down and saw this guy who had some of these out back. I said, ‘That shape looks good for what I’m doing! I’ll make that work.’ Then I just put a head on it, a solid piece of material, and I cut the beak out of a piece
of tubing.

And all the feathers on the birds are made of a used furnace-oil tank. I cut them all out with a plasma cutter, put them in the forge, burn all the paint off, and I hammer all those lines in them by hand. And I don’t know how many feathers are on the neck. There’s at least between 150 to 200 on every bird, on the neck. And then I clear coat. I don’t paint the herons.

I never have to buy any oil tanks, believe me. They arrive here. This yellowish one arrived this week. I wasn’t here one day and when I got home, it was standing there. There’s six out back. When I have one that’s almost cut up, another one arrives. They just appear. That happens a lot. I have people drop steel junk off for me, and I have to go through it because I can’t use all of it.

The Canada Gate—that was huge. In summer 2015, an artist by the name of Nancy Keating told me she had designed a plan for the Last Steps Memorial in Halifax. It represents the last steps soldiers took on Canadian soil before leaving to fight in the First World War. She wanted to know if I could burn footprints into the dock. That was unveiled in 2016, and I was there four days putting footprints into the dock in Halifax. There were 485 footprints. I thought they wanted 150 or something!

Anyway, it worked out fantastic. Everybody was happy, and after they unveiled that, Ken Hynes, the curator at the Halifax Army Museum, called about a month later and said, “Nancy has designed a memorial for another arch to be put in Passchendaele, but we want it made all out of steel.”

We built the Canada Gate here, me and a couple of other guys, and we went to Belgium to put it together. I took the whole family. Went to Vimy Ridge. It was fantastic. Spectacular. And the cemeteries are right up against the edges of the farmers’ fields. There wouldn’t be two inches between the cemetery and where the farmers are harvesting. It’s interesting.

When I was building the Canada Gate, it did not seem like that big a deal, but it’s a big deal now. When you think that someone from Upper Falmouth helped make a national monument for another country, that’s a big deal. It feels that way to me. I think I’m an artist now, but it’s hard in this province to do just artist stuff. I’d love to do just artist stuff but it’s a challenge because you don’t have the volume. If I could get to Ontario, that would be huge. I’d like to do a show or two in the US, and maybe the Muskoka Arts and Crafts show in Ontario. If one guy up there likes your stuff, it’ll keep you busy for the whole year.

The best part of this work is when you have an idea, and you figure out how to make it. Because you’re making your brain work. Or at least trying to make it work! If I see something I like, I just try to make it. You try to make something different all the time. You can’t just make the same thing over and over.”