Trawling for Trash as Treasure--from Maine Magazine--

Today, Brooks has his own scrap pile next to his driveway, in Raymond, filled with odds and ends unearthed from roadsides and construction sites and gifted by friends and family. Mostly, he uses its contents to make fish. Since graduating from Maine College of Art and Design (where he finished his bachelor of fine arts), in 2009, Brooks has focused on piscine sculptures. “The thing about fish is they’re so accessible to people,” he says. “Everybody knows they have a tail, fins, a face. And I feel like in between is where I can fill in what I’m thinking creatively at the time.”

Working on the tailgate of his truck, Brooks cobbles the fish together with layered wood scraps, sometimes adding pattern and texture with items such as old cassette tapes and lengths of metal chain. One specimen has a fan-like tail fashioned from the head of a rake. Another has a plastic tricycle wheel for an eye socket. On a tarp in the driveway, he spray-paints his compositions matte black to create a uniform backdrop, then coats them in brilliant shades in his basement workshop. Next, he paints expressive, overlarge eyes—variously conveying sleepiness, surprise, annoyance—and covers the bodies in dizzying polka-dot and striped patterns that loosely suggest scales and gills.