As the main highway grows distant and the route to Roxy Paines studio in the western Catskills becomes increasingly winding and narrow, all sorts of refuse appears on the roadside lawns: discarded auto parts, dilapidated kitchen cabinets, clusters of dingy scrap metal. On a brisk day in mid-November, one particularly vast swath of metal in the distance catches the sunshine. It’s clear within seconds that it’s no trash heap; it’s 14,000 pounds of industrial stainless-steel pipes that Paine and his team of six metalworkers are transforming into writhing branchlike forms for his latest work, Maelstrom, destined for the Metropolitan Museum of Arts rooftop sculpture garden in April.

Since August, the artist — who also has a house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and a studio in Queens — has more or less sequestered himself here in Treadwell, New York, about 160 miles northwest of Manhattan, with his wife, Sofia. An architect, Sofia transformed an old barn on the property into Paine’s 5,000-square-foot studio back in 2002. "It’s a matter of space," says Paine. "There is no way we could find a situation in the city to accommodate this scale of working."

But the 130-foot-tall, 45-foot-wide Dendroid — as Paine calls these treelike sculptures, of which Maelstrom is his 16th — has outgrown even the Catskills studio’s generous dimensions, so in a mad rush to beat the snowy season, Paine and his team have been working 10-hour days outdoors to assemble the work’s various components before finishing them, to make sure they fit. Once erected, the piece will be dismantled, its sections completed indoors and then reassembled on the roof of the museum. "This is a little different from the process I’d like," Paine says with surprising equanimity.

To create a Dendroid, Paine starts with an ink drawing and then makes a stainless-steel scale model that serves as a constant reference point. Shaping each pipe into a branch takes hours of reforming the steel with a metal-shop machine called a hydraulic bender, and then there is the welding, fitting and finishing.

Tall and lean, with shaggy brown hair and a beard, the 42-year-old Paine has a disarming mellowness that belies the drive revealed when the discussion turns to his art. "My life right now is this work. I live, breathe, eat, drink and piss it," he says. "When it’s done, I’ll collapse for a while." This intensity is no surprise, given the intellectual rigor and laboriousness of his endeavors over the years. He studies a work’s subject, such as fungus or trees, for months before embarking on it, and uses materials — epoxy, electrical wiring, stainless steel — for which tremendous skill and persistence are required to yield the precision he demands. "It’s a process of generating an idea and being propelled forward by it — a long process of intensive research and absorbing everything I can about that particular realm and then expanding on it," he says.

Maelstrom is three to four times the size of his largest previous work, Inversion, 2008, a violently overturned stainless-steel tree that towered menacingly over visitors at the entrance of Art Basel last year. Maelstrom is also his most complex creation to date. It depicts a forest downed by an unseen force of nature plus the "violent, chaotic, uncontrolled force itself." He was inspired, in part, by photographs of Siberian woodland after a meteorite struck it in 1908. In addition, Paine wants Maelstrom to suggest an industrial pipeline exploding, as well as a seizure spreading through the brain. "The idea of simultaneity is very dear to me," he says.

With the morphing, expanding, contracting rhythm of the sculpture’s appendages, Paine is veering toward abstraction in a way he has not before. He hopes it will contextualize his previous pieces. "I see it delving deeper into concepts I’ve dealt with before," he says, "but I do also feel that my past work has been misinterpreted at points. Representation is not at all what I’m interested in."

Raised in McLean, Virginia, Paine ran away from home at 15 to hitchhike cross-country. He eventually earned his GED and made his way to the College of Santa Fe, in New Mexico. In 1986 he spent a year at Pratt, then dropped out to work in a metal shop. "School was no place to learn about metal working," he says.

In 1990 Paine helped launch an artist-run exhibition space called Brand Name Damages, in Williamsburg. Among the earliest works he showed there was a hand-built contraption consisting of troughs filled with used motor oil, ketchup and white paint, each equipped with a brush that would dip into it and fling the contents onto the gallery’s window. This was a precursor to the increasingly complicated machines that produced art objects according to computer programs, which Paine started making in the mid-’90s. One of them, PMU (Painting Manufacture Unit), 1999-2000, was programmed to spray a horizontal canvas, on command, with a delicate layer of white acrylic paint that accumulated at the bottom, suggesting the geologic buildup of sediment over time.

In 2001, Paine installed PMU in his first solo exhibition with New York’s James Cohan Gallery, where he still shows. (Berlin’s Jablonka Galerie currently represents him in Europe.) "It was a remarkable experience," recounts Cohan. "The power of the kind of absent artist was overwhelming. People came to watch the machine, and on the final day of the exhibition, there were around 30 or 40 people there. As [PMU’s robotic arm] made its final path across the canvas, they applauded."

The machines never replaced Paine. Rather, they were intermediaries between him and his art. And the objects produced were not merely by-products of the mechanical activity. "The artworks can’t be compelling only because they were made by this process," says Paine. "They have to be compelling on their own." Despite being machine-generated, each work was unique and unpredictable. "There was tremendous room for the uncontrolled," says Paine. Gravity, time, air current, temperature and humidity level made their mark on the "hand" of the machine, just as they would on the hand of the artist. That seems to be part of the point: All production is subject to a system of forces — environmental, physical, mental and, in this case, electronic.

Alongside his machine-based works, Paine’s early oeuvre includes a distinct, if not incongruous, category of botanical sculptures. Among them is Psilocybe cubensis Field, 1997, composed of more than 2,000 handmade polymer replicas of hallucinogenic mushrooms that appeared to sprout from the floor of New York’s Ronald Feldman gallery, where the piece debuted. Other examples depicted a plot of poppies oozing white liquid and a patch of poison ivy. At the heart of these works is the artist’s fixation on the raw power of natural toxins. At the time he was interested in invoking "this frozen state of potential — the potential for other worlds and other experiences, using only the banal object itself," says Paine. The artist is no stranger to the hallucinogenic potential of fungus: His Drug Ziggurat, 1993, a nine-foot-tall tower of various drugs and drug paraphernalia, including actual mushrooms, is arranged in part according to his personal involvement with them.

In a sense, Erosion Machine, 2005, bridges the gap between Paine’s different bodies of work. It consists of chunks of sandstone placed one at a time in a large glass case and slowly eaten away by silicon carbide blasted from a moving metal arm. Unique data sets — crime statistics, stock-market activity, weather reports — control the air impulses via a laptop. The eroded rocks it produces are the final works of art, with the billions of grains of sand of which they are composed reshaped by another record of activity over time: the thousands of bits of data.

Similarly, with his Dendroids, Paine has found an unlikely connection between the natural world and human activity — in this case, between trees and heavy industry. Since he made his first such work, Impostor, in 1999 during a residency in Sweden, the material, stainless-steel pipes, has been crucial. "I want the work to suggest conveyance in an industrial setting," he explains, "just as a tree is a system of conveyance, from the roots to the branches." But his trees have always been as visually stimulating as they are conceptual. "The challenge was to engage the public without simplifying my work," he says.

Paine’s desire to interact with his audience is what inspired him to work on a larger scale. "I wanted to get my ideas out of the gallery and introduce them in a broader context," he says. He reached thousands of people beyond the art world with Bluff, commissioned by New York’s Public Art Fund and installed in Central Park as part of the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Invited in 2007 to create a major public artwork for the city’s Madison Square Park, he made Conjoined, two massive trees whose branches stretch toward and intertwine with one another; Defunct, a dying tree dotted with poisonous fungi; and Erratic, a group of seemingly displaced boulders.

Paine’s work is in public and private collections around the world, including those of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Washington, D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, in Texas. He is currently completing a proposal for Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, where he would be the first artist of his generation included in the sculpture garden.

The artist’s sculptures aren’t just getting bigger with time; they’re also getting more sophisticated, both formally and intellectually. He likens his creative process to learning a language. Once he gets to know his subject and materials better, he can expand the range of constructions and meanings — as exemplified by his Dendroids. In Paine’s own words: "I was never just going after the representation of a tree."

"Roxy Paine" originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's February 2009 Table of Contents.