As the main highway grows distant and the route to Roxy Paine’s 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 Art’s 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."