SECOND NATURE: Salvaged-Metal Sculpture Meets Haiku in Rockford

For Rockford's Fall ArtScene, three local artists brought together two art forms that don't ordinarily share the same room: salvaged-metal sculpture and haiku. SECOND NATURE, presented at Rockford Art Deli, was a collaboration between metal sculptor Michael Zant and poets Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré. The exhibition paired Zant's handmade animal sculptures with original haiku written in response to the individual pieces, creating a show in which metal and language continually changed the way viewers looked at one another.

The premise was deliberately simple. Zant creates animals and other forms from discarded and repurposed metal. Vaultonburg and Tré each wrote haiku responding to those creatures, with the resulting poems displayed alongside the sculptures. Neither poet was attempting to explain Zant's work. Instead, the poems offered additional ways into it—sometimes playful, sometimes contemplative, sometimes concerned with the actual animal represented in the sculpture and sometimes inspired by the strange second life of the materials themselves. The exhibition also benefited Wild Roots, connecting artwork about wildlife with an organization devoted to helping actual wild animals.

Michael Zant's salvaged-metal sculpture taking shape in the workshop before SECOND NATURE.

Zant's sculptures begin far away from the finished environment of a gallery. Steel scraps, rebar, chain, old tools and pieces of machinery acquire unexpected second lives in his workshop. What was manufactured for one purpose becomes a foot, wing, shell, tail, beak or body. The transformation made haiku an unusually natural companion to the work. Haiku asks a writer to pay close enough attention to an ordinary thing that it becomes strange again. Zant accomplishes something similar physically. An object so familiar that we barely notice it anymore is cut, welded and rearranged until suddenly there is an animal standing in front of us.

Importantly, the original material never entirely disappears. A chain remains recognizably a chain even when it has become an animal's tail. A fork can still be a fork while simultaneously functioning as part of a creature. Rebar retains its industrial identity while becoming bone, leg or spine. That tension between what something was and what it has become is central to the work. The viewer's eye moves back and forth between the illusion and its construction: animal, scrap metal, animal again.

Three of Michael Zant's creatures—frog, turtle and salamander—before their installation at Rockford Art Deli.

Seen together on Zant's worktable, the sculptures reveal something that can become less obvious once artwork reaches a gallery: these objects were unmistakably made by hand. Welds remain visible. Steel retains scratches, discoloration and evidence of previous use. Familiar manufactured objects peek through the anatomy. Rather than concealing those histories, the sculptures make them part of the animals' personalities. A turtle assembled from metal remains unmistakably a turtle, but look again and the illusion breaks apart into individual remnants of human industry. Look once more and the turtle returns.

For SECOND NATURE, Vaultonburg and Tré generally approached each sculpture independently. Rather than collaborating on a single poem that told the viewer what the sculpture meant, each poet was free to discover something different in the same creature. Their haiku were printed on small individual tiles and displayed with the artwork. A visitor could therefore encounter Zant's sculpture, then one poet's response, then the other's, creating a small three-way conversation among object, language and observer. The poems weren't labels. They were additional acts of attention.

The collaboration also produced Wild Cogs, a small haiku chapbook by Vaultonburg and Tré created for the exhibition. Its title captures much of the central idea and humor of SECOND NATURE. The mechanical and natural worlds aren't necessarily opposites here. A manufactured object can become part of an imagined ecosystem. Something discarded can acquire another identity. The cog becomes the creature, and the boundary between human debris and animal form becomes unexpectedly porous.

There was another dimension to making wildlife the center of the exhibition. Proceeds from SECOND NATURE benefited Wild Roots, giving the project's transformations a practical connection to the living world outside the gallery. Representations of animals assembled from discarded human materials could, in a small way, help people caring for actual wildlife. That gave the exhibition's title another meaning. Second nature usually describes something practiced until it becomes instinctive, but here it could be read almost literally: nature made a second time.

A piece of metal is manufactured, used and eventually discarded. Someone picks it up. Michael Zant sees an animal in it. Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré look at that animal and find poems. Eventually the whole strange chain of transformations arrives in a gallery in downtown Rockford, where someone else looks at it and sees something none of the three artists anticipated. For an exhibition constructed largely from objects that had already lived one useful life, that seems exactly right.

SECOND NATURE was presented at Rockford Art Deli, 402 E. State Street in downtown Rockford, as part of Fall ArtScene 2026.