Wire Stories Dentist Bends And Welds Wire Into Artworks That Tell Tales

Melvin DeMond doesn’t worry about the “Is it art?” question.

That’s because he makes his wire sculptures for fun.

“I like to say I recycle coat hangers,” said the quietly affable Spokane dentist.

And he’s gone through a small mountain of them. In the nearly 30 years since he started fashioning caricatures and whimsical scenes out of wire, he has produced some 300 pieces.

The themes range from Alfred Hitchcock to Wyatt Earp, from a helicopter to a salmon fisherman battling a hopelessly tangled line.

His “self-portrait” shows a dentist working on a patient board-stiff with tension.

DeMond’s largest sculpture, this one not made from hangers, is a 12-foot Scottish Highlander crafted for Shadle Park High School’s class of 1974. That class included one of his daughters.

He has sold a few, but most have been given to friends. “Many are now sitting in the back of people’s closets,” he said, smiling.

Maybe. But DeMond’s work has its fans. The Museum of Flight in Seattle currently has several of his skeletonlike metal airplanes on display in an exhibit at Sea-Tac International Airport.

Dozens and dozens of other pieces adorn office shelves, desks and coffee tables throughout this area.

“If anyone gets a kick out of them or sees the humor, then that’s so much the better,” said DeMond, 69.

Though a South Hill resident now, he has been practicing dentistry on the North Side for 40 years.

He grew up in Boise and served as a naval aviator during the Korean War. He has held leadership roles in community organizations such as the Spokane Symphony board and the Kiwanis. And he plays golf and bridge. But to some, he’s also the guy who wired Spokane.

“It’s amazing to me, how much motion and emotion you can get out of a piece of wire,” he said.

Many of his creations look a bit like stick figures and a bit like three-dimensional cartoons. But somewhere in the bending and welding he does out in his garage, sometimes using dental tools, he captures feelings and foibles. “Every one tells a story,” he said.

Though his postman father was an amateur craftsman, DeMond doesn’t claim that art is in his blood. “I couldn’t draw my name,” he said.

But one day in 1970, he eyed a stack of skinny white hangers and thought, “There ought to be something you can do with those.”

He was right. If you are Mel DeMond, you can make people smile with them. Assuming they get the joke, that is.

“I did one one time of a little guy trying to mount a horse,” he recalled. “He had the wrong foot in the stirrup, so when he got on the horse he would be facing backward. And nobody caught on.”

But DeMond still liked it. “After I get started, I can hardly wait to get done and then start on another one.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo