Leslie Murray's Junk People
Woodbury, Connecticut
Leslie Murray learned how to weld from her husband, co-owner of a Woodbury auto repair shop. Beginning in 2005 she populated the town, her yard, and the road frontage outside the repair shop with sculptures made from all manner of bendable, weldable junk: auto mufflers, farm machinery, garbage cans, license plates, old tools, bottle caps, metal tubing, kitchen cutlery. Abstract architectural embellishments have been interspersed with more familiar roadside car-parts statues, such as a tin man, a police officer, a gardening girl.
Leslie's burst of public work seems to have stalled in 2011: her stated plans to sculpt a cowboy and mermaid don't appear to have been completed, although maybe we just haven't been looking in the right places.