And his talent for turning the parts into sculptures of those subjects, and scores of others, has built the Queensland-based former car wrecker a growing reputation in the international art world.
His expressive pieces – full of life and personality – are sought by collectors both here and overseas. And he is represented by galleries in the US and UK as well as Australia, where works like his Scottish black-face ram with its thick coat of spark plugs have sold for up to £14,000 ($25,000).
He hasn’t worked in the wrecking yard for 10 years now, but his years there sparked up a creativity that had been ignored since he abandoned a previous signwriting career, but which then started to blend with his love of cars.
“I’ve always been a car lover, and I was racing off-road buggies when I started playing with the idea of doing a sculpture in 1998, so the first piece I made was one of those,” Corbett remembers. “I was going to give it to the club I raced with to use as a trophy – but then I couldn’t bear to give it away.
“So I kept it on the counter at the wrecking yard and it got a lot of comment. I’d really enjoyed doing it, so I did a few more… and then thought I’d see what I could do with this.
“I’d always told my kids that if you think you have a talent, you have to use it. So I had to put my money where my mouth was.” He kept making pieces, and selling them, and getting commissions – including a major one to create a series of native animals from Toyota parts for a major dealership.
But while his pieces combined the car world and the art world, sometimes the two collided. “I nearly missed the opening of my first exhibition (in Brisbane),” Corbett says. “I was the last one to arrive because just as I was leaving the wrecking yard a guy came in who’d driven from Toowoomba to get some parts. So I was late for my own show.”
Within two years of making his first sculpture, he realised he’d have to choose between the wrecking yard and the art that was streaming out of it – but with a commission book full of orders and a successful exhibition at Sydney’s Michael Commerford Gallery, the choice was fairly clear.
Despite no longer working in the yard, Corbett spends nearly the same amount of time carefully looking at car parts, and collecting those destined for a new life as art materials.
“Often, I know a shape is one I’m looking for or I really like a piece because it’s got so much character and it will be a feature piece in something,” he says.
“Sometimes you don’t know when you get it what it will be and other times you know immediately -- and sometimes that creates what the subject is. Other times you do the subject and find the pieces you need to make it work. Certain sculptures are more fun as they’re coming together, like The Lurcher (a large and decidedly guilty-looking hound)."
“Other pieces fight you while you’re making them, but they still end up a really nice sculpture. It’s a fine line between fun and frustration.”
And cars still play a big role in Corbett’s life as well as in his sculpture, with some of his handiwork ending up as part of his garage. “I’ve got some old racing cars, including one that is a 1930s sprint car -- for want of a better description -- that I built from old parts in the same way they would have build them back then,” he says.
“It’s a replica but it’s all old parts and I raced that in vintage racing for a couple of years … before I decided that it might kill me. So I race Formula Fords now instead. I have an old T-Model Ford, and I have a car I’m very slowly restoring that raced in the 1949 Australian Grand Prix and which I stumbled upon one day… or it found me, really."
“When I still had the wrecking business but had started doing the sculptures, I had one of a similar car – the general shape – on the counter at work. And a customer who saw it said ‘oh, you’d love what I’ve got at home’.
“So I went around and had a look and it was his father’s car, hanging up in the rafters. And he was right … I liked it, so I bought it off him, and I’ve been slowly doing bits and bobs to it since then.”
When he’s not tinkering with that, Corbett’s time is currently taken up with preparing for his next overseas exhibition and with thoughts of a new project in the form of a large format book showing his sculptures and explaining how he came to do them.
“I meet a lot of people who would like to have a piece but can’t afford one, so I thought they might like to have a book,” he says. “And I’m also getting lots of email from schoolkids in the US because the teachers there are showing them my work, and I think a book would appeal to the kids if it was in school libraries.
“I’d like to show them it wasn’t the traditional way to become an artist, that maybe if they thought of something unusual they could do it too.”
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