LAS FLORES CANYON : Memories Mold a Post-Fire Sculpture

It has been said that one person’s garbage is another person’s art.

In the case of Heather McKay, it’s certainly true. Except that McKay’s art is her garbage--more specifically, the remains of her Malibu home, which was destroyed in the 1993 fires that swept through Las Flores Canyon.

A few weeks after the fire, McKay invited artist Ariel Heart to see her once-beautiful home, now reduced to a sickening pile of twisted metal and rubble. Later that night, McKay called Heart and asked her if she’d be interested in creating a sculpture out of the remains.

Nine months later, Heart completed “Homage to a Past Life,” a striking, all-metal piece that takes its shape in a swirling infinity symbol, and its personality in the arms-uplifted angel. “The angel is made of . . . copper tubing, a refrigerator coil and air conditioning units,” Heart says, reeling off a partial list of components. Other handy parts in the sculpture include a lamp base, a garage door opener, drill bits, faucets, keys, a fireplace screen and a pair of vegetable steamers.

At the beginning of the project, Heart met with a work crew and picked through the usable metal--three tons worth--which was delivered to a large garage and warehouse that she had rented in Malibu. Not until then did she appreciate the reality and scope of the undertaking.

“Total panic set in,” the artist says cheerfully. “I didn’t sleep for three days, just paced around, drawing in my sketchbook. I kept making figure-eights, started to feel the deck railing. Then I got the image of the infinity symbol, because it goes on and on. And that was the get-go.”

At the end of her four-month lease, Heart was forced to move out of that space, and had the unfinished project moved--via flatbed truck--to the garage of a Ramirez Canyon home McKay had rented. (Now, after 1 1/2 years of hammering out a settlement with her insurance company, McKay plans to break ground on her former home site in September.)

“I was lucky to have a client who gave me complete artistic freedom,” Heart says. “She was totally supportive.”

Heart had the help of an assistant, David Lindberg. “He did the heavy lifting,” the artist explains, “but I worked pretty hard myself: welding, grinding, varnishing. It was a crash course in metalwork.”

With the experience now behind her, Heart figures it will be a long time before any project gets her creative juices going as this one did. “Other people ski or ride motorcycles; they’re daredevils,” she says. “This is my artistic equivalent of that sensation.”

Born in Bad Schwalbach, Germany, Heart emigrated to the United States at age five (her mother was German, her father an American soldier), but it was hardly a sedentary childhood. “We moved 17 times,” the Los Feliz resident says.

Having a private, portable mode of expression was helpful. “My mother says the first thing I ever did besides eat and talk was draw,” she recalls. “I had my first show of drawings when I was 16.” In December, the artist will have a solo exhibit at the Desmond Gallery in West Hollywood.

Heather McKay was already a collector of Heart’s work when the fire hit, and the artist was moved when she realized that McKay had managed to save two of her paintings before escaping the blaze. But she is especially proud of the “Homage” sculpture, and what it stands for: “It’s the first time that something was destroyed, then rebuilt as something beautiful. It leaves a positive impression of going on and continuity. Also in the ‘90s, it’s the idea of recycled objects. But more than that, it’s that in a crisis, this woman wanted to create something beautiful.”

In the five years before the fire, Heather McKay, a retired film editor, had experienced the deaths of her mother, father and longtime lover. “I had just gotten my life organized, bought an editing system--then everything was gone,” she says. “I had 15 minutes to get out. I lost everything that had been handed down to me. So what this sculpture represents is an homage to that past life: the tools that were my father’s, the kitchen implements that were my mother’s. It’s nice to see them turned into something that celebrates the past, not mourns it.”

The new house, to be designed by architect Ed Niles, will reflect that sentiment, with Heart’s sculpture (suspended 16 feet in the air) as the centerpiece.

“The piano harp from my baby grand, the other things I’ve saved--I’m turning it all into art,” says McKay, who also plans to make a documentary about the rebuilding project. “Having gone through the bereavement I did, if you try to obliterate that, it’s a mistake. If you embrace life, you embrace the changes, the adventures. So this was really a healing thing I did for myself.”