Paula Castillo Art

Paula Castillo strives to make her sculptures both beautiful and unsettling.

Growing up in New Mexico in a multicultural Hispanic and Lebanese family whose members included many welders, “I was surrounded by scrap metal and machinery,” Castillo recalls. So when she decided to become an artist after working in an electronics factory for a time, she turned to metal instinctively.

Castillo’s work brings together the manmade and natural worlds. She first designs her biomorphic forms on a computer and then builds them by hand-welding together thousands of small pieces of industrial steel byproduct. In her decades-long career, she has completed a number of large-scale public installations, including commissions for the City of Albuquerque and the New Mexico’s Art in Public Places program.

Find a collection of Paula Castillo sculptures on 1stDibs.