James McSharry builds on his off-roading Jeep hobby to create towering artwork
In a sprawling garage workshop behind James McSharry’s home near Paris Mountain, on a stained concrete floor, sits a beat-up old Jeep. It’s sculptor James McSharry’s pride and joy—and a key influence on his art.
Since high school, he and his friends have headed to quarries in Tennessee, old coal mines in Kentucky, or federal lands in California to go “rock crawling.”
“It’s so much fun,” says McSharry, 27. “We just head out into the woods and let it rip.” They find challenging trails, modify their Jeeps if needed, and try to make it to the top of hills or mountains, sometimes rolling and flipping along the way (but with safety measures including helmets and 5-point harnesses).
The Jeep, purchased when he was 15, “has been through a lot. It doesn’t have a straight edge on it anymore, but it tells a lot of good stories.”
He loves the speed, the stakes, the wind in his face, and camping after the climb, but his engineering mind also loves the puzzle of it all. Each trail presents new challenges, and part of the adventure is figuring out how to tackle each one.
And when he gets back? The fun continues when he takes his scraped, beaten, and broken Jeep and fixes it up again.
Year after year, this process inspired his love of welding as he repaired the Jeep and added a roll cage, custom suspension, and numerous upgrades. Factor in a lifetime around the arts—his mother Kelly McSharry owned Creating Artists for Tomorrow, a children’s art studio—and his fascination with steel sculpture takes shape.
Solving the puzzle
McSharry graduated from Wade Hampton High School, with two years of carpentry at Enoree Career Center, and went on to earn a packaging science degree from Clemson University. During weekdays, he works in the engineering department at a film plant, helping to create packages for produce and gummy bears. “I enjoy it,” he says. “I’d love to do art full time, but this pays the bills and they give me flexibility, so you can’t beat the situation.”
Evenings and weekends—when he isn’t rock crawling, working on his Jeep, or renovating his house—he is making steel sculptures that stretch up to eight feet high, each a study in form and stacked in deceptively complex ways.
As befitting an engineer and lifelong Lego enthusiast, he loves considering how the pieces fit together. “I look at the triangles sitting on these small points and think, how am I going to get it to carry that load?”
It all starts with a sketch, followed by cutting shapes and then working with them on the ground to contemplate how they should be attached. “Sometimes they need a pretty beefy internal gusseting system inside as well as under the base,” he says. “That’s my favorite part, figuring all of that out.”
He’s developed a patina process, including an acid wash and a rinse, that encourages the rusty orange color and pebbled texture that comes naturally to the steel and reminds McSharry of the red rocks he sees out west while rock crawling. The corten steel, or weathering steel, “likes to go a certain way, though in the future, I want to mess with different colorations,” he says.
James McSharry Finds Inspiration
Before it opened in 2019, McSharry helped paint and update Oyé Studios, which gave him access to an unused basement studio space. Rey Alfonso, a cofounder of Oyé, appreciated McSharry’s early sculptures made of found objects and old Jeep parts like cam shafts and gearboxes.
It was a fulfilling hobby for McSharry, and nothing he took too seriously, until a fateful conversation with Alfonso in 2021 that gave McSharry the confidence to push himself as an artist.
“One day, Rey came down and said, ‘You can make something cooler; you can make it your own. Don’t use the shapes, make the shapes.’”
Inspired, he began experimenting with creating his own forms, including irregular closed curves and sharp pyramid stacks. Interest in his work quickly began to grow.
This year, after four years of effort, he achieved his goal of being a part of Artisphere. “As a kid growing up in Greenville, walking around every Mother’s Day with my mom—being able to have her walk by my booth was pretty cool. And it’s been a dream of mine, so I was really happy to be there.”
Next steps include creating public works alongside his fiancee, artist Glory Day Loflin, who he met in the stairwell at Oyé Studios. “We’re diving into that, looking at how the process works for new parks, hotel projects,” McSharry says. “We have some big ideas we’ve been talking about.”
More with James McSharry
Age: 27
Degree: B.S. in packaging science, Clemson University
Goals: Public works, Artisphere again next year, and “an Open Studios show with a yard full of sculptures.”
(Plus, getting married, renovating his house, fixing up his Jeep, and taking it to Tennessee.)
When you aren’t working or making art: Mountain biking
Raised in: Greenville, but spent four years in Dusseldorf, Germany
Learning next: TIG welding, working with stainless steel
