Tom & James Franco Open New Art Exhibit of Carvings on Giant Sewer Pipes

James Franco is up to a new, unlikely artistic endeavor: carving images onto giant clay sewer pipes with his brother, Tom. They've mounted their creations at Arizona State University's Art Museum, and titled the exhibition Pipe Brothers: Tom and James Franco, which runs through September 23.

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The pipes come from Phoenix's Mission Clay Products, which has been offering up products to local artists for 40 years through its Arts and Industry program. "Artists come from all over the world and they can work in the Phoenix factory," exhibition curator Garth Johnson told FOX. "They can carve, they can color, they can glaze, they can shape [the clay] any way that they want and then the factory fires them along with the rest of the pieces."

Mission Clay!!!! Phoenix Arizona "Dragon Slayer" Collaboration with my brother James Franco, Heather Fairweather, Colin Hurley, Oliver Bacoy, Shane Lutzk, Iris Torres and Jenifer Howell! An Elysium Bandini Studios project

A post shared by Tom Franco (@tom__franco) on Feb 22, 2017 at 1:12pm PST

Tom is a well-established mixed media artist in Oakland, California, having founded the Firehouse Art Collective, a non-profit which provides low-cost spaces for creatives to live and work. "I've completely fallen into obsession with the cylindrical form," he said in a press release. "It's like finding primal shape that we can't live without."

The brothers made many visits to the Phoenix space to work on their pipes, operating in extreme conditions: sauna-like temperatures and the floor flooded with water to keep the pipes from cracking in the Arizona heat. Each pipe is seven and a half feet tall, weighing close to 750 pounds, and has to be handled with a forklift.

Whales pipe :)

A post shared by Tom Franco (@tom__franco) on Jan 17, 2017 at 12:03am PST