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The old wood shed behind Dennis Parker’s Southdowns home is a cramped, rickety heat box, especially from May to September. Its dim interior lights pull the cover of darkness off bizarre shapes and ghastly figures. But there he sits, most likely a cigarette between his lips, almost every night from 10 until he’s had enough. Friends and colleagues at the LSU School of Music have called Parker a “slaughterer of instruments” for the hobby-turned-obsession he practices in this shed.

In all fairness, the New York City native and veteran cello professor has sawed into pieces once-trashed trombones, pianos, cellos and countless violins. He bought a couple of old electric guitars from a neighbor and dissected those. But he doesn’t simply hack them to their elemental pieces. Parker repurposes the deconstructed instruments in a variety of ways, the results ranging from practical to ornamental: a cello headstock menorah, a violin purse, music stands made of trombone arms, bassoons and bedposts, and dozens of Southern Gothic-by-way-of-Dr.-Seuss wall hangings. Parker calls them all sculptures, even the larger-than-life violin-bodied roaches he models after the critters that frequent his wood shed.

“I’ve been a cellist since I was six, so having wood in my hands—and working with the shape, the feel and the color of it—has been a natural thing,” he says. “I started out just playing instruments, now I cut them up and give them a new life.”

The process of musical performance is, in some ways, infinite. That is, there is always room for improvement. But what seems to appeal to Parker is the ability to carve a piece of wood and call it finished. In a way his instrument-themed sculptures are a reaction to his skilled musicianship. “It is a form of catharsis, humor and relaxation more than anything else for me,” he says. “The fact that I perform serious classical music by day, and risk cutting my fingers off by night is part of the allure.”

Parker travels the world performing and instructs 10 or so students each semester, many from foreign countries.

Perhaps inspired by his wife Jacquie’s evocative literary collages, the 47-year-old classical musician took up sculpting and woodwork a decade ago when he became enamored with making small piano-shaped storage boxes out of found materials. He calls boxes “euphemisms for life.” A hundred of these piano boxes line the shelves of Parker’s small wood shed, each uniquely detailed with cigar box labels, sheet music, pages from old books and magazines, or stray remnants from their former lives as different objects all together.

“Wood just moves around,” Parker says, musing over his collection. “It migrates and becomes something else.”

The centerpiece of Parker’s collection is a vintage upright piano he converted into his office desk at LSU. Glass covers the 88 keys and upper shelf for workspace, and the vertical piano strings hold family photos and scribbled notes-to-self. The derelict piano was on its way out of the door of the LSU music building and marked for the dumpster when Parker spotted it and wheeled it to his office.

A few of his pieces have been shown at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City, and Parker is working on a Web site with a gallery of his work. Much of it hangs in his home or has been given to friends, but he is considering selling his sculptures online for the first time.

Parker’s next project will be to move his operation out of his creaky old wood shed and into a new, weatherproof workshop. Until then, he will be holed up in that shed facilitating the death and resurrection of castaway instruments for their second life as something new. “The termites aren’t eating my sculptures,” he says. “So that’s a good thing.”

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