Artist and sculptor Tim Glover has had a successful career since moving to Houston in 1986.

As the sculptor of the pinecones at the entrance of Town Green Park and the helix at Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, his work is on display daily in The Woodlands.

“I mainly like to work in steel, and that’s my medium of choice,” Glover said. “It’s the one I spend the most time with, and as a fabricator—somebody who likes to form, bend and connect metal into different kinds of form and shape—it’s best where there’s a real passion for me being in the studio and having that hands-on process.”

Glover described his work as falling somewhere on the spectrum between representational and abstract.

“Sometimes I like to make things that are representational that look like they’re supposed to be something, but maybe there’s an odd twist to it or something that just seems a little out of place that makes you have to reconsider it,” he said. “Other times, the pieces might be more abstract and put together from found scraps and things that suggest no kind of form, and I just follow what I see.”

Glover said the pinecones he sculpted for Town Green Park in 2005 were fun to work with because he was able to see The Woodlands’ 2-D logo turn into a 3-D, representational piece of art.

“They went through an evolution in the design phase,” he said. “My first design was much more loose and gestural. The finished piece ended up being a lot more polished and unified.”

In 2004, when Glover was commissioned to create the helix sculpture for Lexicon Pharmaceuticals Inc., he said his approach was more abstract than the others. Glover has been asked to sculpt helixes for a few other places before, including the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

“The one I did at Lexicon, which I think I like best, was done a lot differently and it was more abstract—not the usual representational helix that you would see in a genetics book illustration,” he said.

He said being able to take the connection between the helix strands and the DNA bond and then represent them with square steel tubes fanned out into a helix shape was what he really liked about the piece.

“It’s wonderful to have some of my work in The Woodlands, which is really such a beautiful community in the way that they’ve incorporated art,” he said.

Glover, who studied at Memphis College of Art and the University of South Florida, has had his art exhibited at local galleries like Redbud in The Heights and international spaces, including the Shanghai Art Museum in China.

In the classroom

Glover teaches art at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts in the Montrose area.

“I’m really about technique and process and trying to pass that on and share it with my students so that it can help them to produce the kind of things they want to make,” Glover said.

In his classes, Glover said he focuses on passing on the knowledge he acquired during his years outside the classroom.

“I practiced as a self-employed studio artist for over 20 years before I got into teaching,” he said. “I’d already had an opportunity to do a lot of things.”

Glover said he still makes time for his own projects throughout the year as well.

“I keep up my studio practice, and I get to really concentrate on it in the summertime when we’re off for summer break,” he said. “I do keep my hand at it through the school year as much as I can.”