Alchemists have been around since the Middle Ages claiming the ability to turn base metals into gold. Some of our local alchemists turn discarded beams, gears, tanks, light poles and freezers into our local cultural gold - art.

Walk down the gravel driveway to Mike Roig's studio, gallery and home on West Main Street, in Carrboro he shares with wife, the author and illustrator Clay Carmichael. Over the entrance to his workshop is his iconic winged steel heart inspired by the ancient Sufi saying, "Only a heart with wings can fly." Another such heart adorns the portals to Weaver Street Market in Carrboro.

A passionate, articulate, muscular, quiet man, Mike says, "If I have a story to tell, I tell it with the piece."

Sometimes, though, the piece becomes the community's story as it did with his recently famous "Obama" sculpture, now highly visible along the edge of the yard. When Roig began the piece last year, he kept pulling at the huge sheet of metal with torches and hammers until the oversized bust of a man emerged, as large as an Easter Island head. Passersby kept asking "Is it Obama?" So by election time, last year, finally it was transformed into the President.

Old bearings, gears and beams that once made factories hum are now working the imagination of a community. To keep his own wheels spinning Mike says, "If I get stuck for inspiration, my wife will tell me, 'It's time to go to the scrap yard' and off I go."

Most of Roig's larger public work is kinetic, often spinning in more than one orbit. His slogan is "Art that moves."

Beginning in the sculpture garden that is his West Main Street yard in Carrboro, Roig's massive pieces are all over our community. His most prominent pieces are the fountain at Weaver Street Market and the Promethean Honor Guard at Chapel Hill Fire Station No. 5. The Community Church just purchased his "Got My Mojo Working." His web page ( www.mikeroig.co) tells where more of his stuff can be seen all across the state.

Riley Foster: Keepin' it raw

Riley Foster is a West Virginia coal miner's son who learned welding in high school so he could follow his father into the mines. Not exactly thrilled with that future prospect, he took off shortly after high school and landed in Efland in 1980. You can find him almost every Saturday at the Carrboro Farmer's Market with a ready smile and a plethora of affordable sunbursts, bugs, planters and bobble head men, all resurrected from helium tanks, car parts, farm implements and other industrial discards.

In 1987, while working a job welding for Basnight and Sons at their old hardware store on West Main Street, Riley "saw" his first sculpture staring back at him from a box of scrap under a table there. He assembled "The "Knight," who still stands in his yard.

His art career took off slowly, but now his pieces are exhibited not only in Disney World and the House of Blues at Myrtle Beach but even at the Orange County Landfill. There one of Riley's ubiquitous sun faces graces the cage holding the empty helium and Freon tanks he uses for the stock.

Foster attributes his style and success partly to one statement from the late Max Steele, UNC English professor and an early patron. Steele, on seeing the work, urged him to "Keep it raw."

Today Foster divides his time between making art and the more practical pursuits of truck frame repair, stair railing fabrication and installation. But he also finds time for the slightly less practical art of "punkin chunkin'" The chunkin' is done using his home-made trebujet, or counter-weighted catapult, to fling pumpkins well over 300 feet. What began as a junior high science project with his son and friends is now a new fundraiser for local charities where people pay $5 to fling a pumpkin in the air.

John Amero: Metalmorphisis

After a teenage trip to Canada in the early '70s where he saw metal being welded directly into art forms John Amero was, he says "Turned on by the torch."

"The ability to take a hard, cold, structural steel form and heat it to 2,700 degrees until it flows like lava," he said, "has fascinated me since."

A broad-chested, animated stocky guy with a full beard and white-blonde hair, he said, "We still live in the iron age. ... Our blood is full of iron. Metal is all around us. Just last fall, while teaching a blacksmithing workshop at Shakori Hills Music Festival, I found they didn't have a chisel, so I wandered around til I found a piece of rebar and forged it into a chisel. You don't have to go far to find a piece of steel."

Amero's life has been filled with iron and steel during the 28 years since he landed in Pittsboro after leaving his northern New Jersey hometown of Patterson. Along with Riley Foster, John is a fan and beneficiary of the Orange County landfill's Freon and helium tank collection program. Out of piles of scrap at Amero's workshop germinate his colorful signature big flowers. Combining these tanks that become the flower petals with small carbon dioxide whipping cream canisters he transforms into the stamens and pistils, coneflowers, tulips and daisies bloom.

His fanciful, funky and functional work is all over Pittsboro the Triangle and beyond. ( www.johnamerometal.com) A bouquet of 20 of his flowers recently sprouted at the Raleigh County West Virginia Landfill. A glance atop the Chatham County Courthouse shows his restored classic wind vane. The planned new Chatham Library has commissioned a steel fence to be made of scrap.

No problem for Amero; he has a yard full of it. What he doesn't have people often drop off. "People like me," he grins fervidly, "are the composters of the metal world. We take big pieces of steel and use them little by little as food for new creations."