Unveiling My First Public Sculpture in McKinney, TX!

Y’ALL. I cannot even believe I’m sharing this today, but I just installed my first public sculpture!! 

This project was incredible in so many ways, and it’s surreal to me that it’s complete. It was such a learning experience – changing and evolving your style is scary! I’m known for my clean-line murals, so to branch out to something like this was a huge leap for me.

I’ve done pottery in the past, and that was a great warm-up to a sculpture piece, but working with totally metal was brand new. Metal and welding are completely different languages from painting! But I absolutely love learning everything about it. 

How My First Public Sculpture Came To Be

It’s kind of a crazy story how this sculpture came to be. 

You might remember, but in early 2024, I had just finished my largest mural to date in Orlando, Florida. After that project wrapped, I didn’t have any big projects lined up, which, if you’re an entrepreneur, you know is a very scary thought. Well, whenever I have those scary thoughts, I like to redirect them into learning something new. 

So I decided to learn everything I could about sculptures. Landon and I had taken a pottery class a while back, and our teacher, Melissa Fiskaldo, really supported me through the challenge of switching my thinking from 2D to 3D. The seed was definitely planted, and I wanted to learn more! 

I met with sculpture mentors, fabricators, and even took a 3D class. I leaned in HARD, even though I had no project in mind. It was just a way for me to fuel my creativity and keep my mental game strong in between projects. 

Then, I got a call from the city of McKinney, asking if I was available for a project. Assuming it was for a mural (because that’s what I do!), I agreed. I went into the meeting, though, and they said, “We know you do murals, but would you ever consider doing a sculpture?” 

I literally almost fell out of my chair. It was the most serendipitous moment ever!! 

The Sculpture Plan

The Location 

The sculpture was planned for the center of a traffic roundabout in McKinney, Texas. McKinney is a suburb of Dallas/Fort Worth and is known for its arts and cultural district with lots of restaurants, entertainment, and shopping. 

The Design 

I’ve always been drawn to florals, and that’s been the inspiration for a lot of my artwork over the years. I love that they don’t have to be perfect – you can embrace the organic nature of them and just create. 

So I knew that for my first sculpture, I wanted to incorporate flowers somehow. The design that I landed on is a group of giant metal flowers, with colorful acrylic petals. At first I thought I wanted all the flower petals to be different colors, but ultimately I decided to go with a monochromatic theme to better complement all of the buildings around the roundabout.   

When all was said and done, the sculpture wound up being 25 feet tall and was built in nine pieces in total! 

I also painted a mural on a nearby building to coordinate with the sculpture!

The Process

The Sculpture Planning Stages & Fabrication 

I initially started the planning process for the back in the Spring of 2024. The first thing I did was hire a tutor to help me learn to take my drawings and turn them into a 3D model. I then sent that model to the engineer, who created plans to make sure everything was structurally sound. 

I took those plans and presented them to the city council, and once we got their approval, it was full steam ahead! 

To help with the metal cutting and welding, I brought on the team of fabricators at Delux Built Fabrication, and I am SO GLAD I did. Cody and his team were amazing to work with, and they’ve become great friends throughout this process! I wanted to be as involved as I could in the metal process (without being a helicopter mom), and had weekly check-ins with Delux Built to see how progress was going and to work out any issues.  

I can’t say enough great things about Cody and his fabrication team, they’re the best. They helped me bring my vision to life, despite a few hiccups along the way! For instance, at one point, I realized that the metal sheets they were building from were shiny when new, but in my design, I planned for the metal to have a natural, aged, rusted look and a patina. 

At first, we thought that couldn’t be achieved, but impossible isn’t in my vocabulary, so the team worked with me to come up with a solution! We wound up watering and sandblasting the metal to get the look I was envisioning, and it worked! 

[We actually filmed a mini doc about the entire process, which you can watch on my Instagram!]

Installation 

After months and months of planning and working on this thing, it was finally time to install it! 

The first thing to be done was to pour the foundation at the roundabout to give the flowers something to anchor to. We dug out the ground and poured 370 cubic feet of concrete to make it look like the flowers are growing straight out of the ground! 

Then the official installation began. We started on a Monday, and the goal for day one was to deliver all of the flower pieces, start welding the tallest flower stem together, and get the second flower step up. That moment of seeing the pieces vertical for the first time was pretty crazy!! 

Ultimately, it took four days to install (even with a little rain on day 3 – but without rain, there’d be no flowers!), and we finished just in time for the Fourth of July weekend. 

Dallas-based Artist

It’s hard to believe that this project is wrapped up! From that first Google search of “how to build a sculpture” in early 2024, to the installation in July of 2025, this was a massive undertaking! But I couldn’t be more proud of how it turned out. 

This project absolutely lit a fire in me to do more sculptures and to continue evolving my artwork, so if you’re interested in working together on a project, I’d love to hear from you! Whether it’s for a sculpture, a mural, or something else cool and exciting, I’m game 🙂