A lot of 63-year-old Steve Mayse’s current artwork can be traced back to when he was 5 years old growing up in Plattsburg, Mo., where his carpenter grandfather would bring home scrap pieces of wood left over from birdhouses he had built. “He would dump them in front of me like I was supposed to do something with them, so I did,” Mayse says. “It all goes back to working with what you can find.” After decades as an advertising and editorial illustrator, Mayse is back to this method with his three-dimensional art. When he’s not teaching as a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute, he’s assembling art in his studio out of any object he can find in his self-described “nest,” whether it’s steel, plexiglass, wood, photographs or old antiques. “I think there may be part of me that needs that kind of finding order out of chaos. I enjoy that,” he says. Fourteen of Steve Mayse’s pieces are on display at the Walter Yost Art Gallery at Highland Community College in Highland, Kan., through Feb. 26.