[3] Often focusing on large-scale sculpture, Handforth’s work reflects objects from public spaces—street signs, fluorescent lights, street lamps, and traffic cones.
[4] Handforth also works with fluorescent light tubes, creating representations of such things suns, stars, lightning bolts, or abstract designs placed on gallery walls.
The Public Art Fund sponsored Handforth's Lamppost (2003), which was installed at the Doris Freedman Plaza in Midtown Manhattan.
[14] Handforth's first solo show in the United Kingdom was in 2004 at The Modern Institute in Glasgow, Scotland, which again held exhibitions of his work in 2006 and 2010.
The exhibition presented works such as Fire, neon light tubes mounted on a gallery wall; Volcano, a tree stump covered in colored wax from candles alight atop it; and Left, an oversized street sign bent into an S-shape.
[15] Mark Handforth's outdoor exhibition (2011) on the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago’s plaza displays three large-scale and one small-scale work: PhoneBone combines an oversized femur set upright with an equally oversized yellow phone handset affixed to the bone’s side; LamppostSnake and Blackbird—a large, bent lamppost and a massive black aluminum hanger, respectively—sit atop the building’s plinths on either side of the staircase; BeatProp displays an English Bobby hat atop a safety cone, each colored with dripped paint.