?Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.? ?Oprah Winfrey

HOW MANY ROLLS OF scotch tape would it take to wrap a man? Ask 3M - or celebrity 3D street artist Mark Jenkins, for that matter.

From the bowels of Rio de Janeiro to the bright streets of Bethlehem, this Washington-based artist has been using the city as a canvass for his installation pieces-transparent street sculptures made entirely of adhesive packing tape.

Jenkins?s creatures of tape have been featured in hip French glossies, a local Korean news website (which, strangely enough, even ran a full interview with him), US art blog Wooster Collective, and a German art book, ?Hidden Track: How Visual Culture is Going Places.?

Wrap Star

At 37 years old, scotch tape seems to have taken over Jenkin?s life. But his fascination with these famously sticky strips of plastic began in 2003, when the nomadic American found himself teaching English in Brazil.

Bored and a little restless between classes, he decided to make a cast of a foil ball on his desk out of Cellotape. Amused by his creation, he went on to wrap every single object in his apartment?pots, pans, and what-not?until there was only one thing left: Himself.

It turned out to be a bloody recipe for disaster. Jenkins literally mummified himself (the lower back proved to be particularly difficult) before realizing that his circulation was being cut off. In the process of prying himself free, he cut his legs with a fresh new pair of scissors.

Eventually, though, he learned to perfect this rather bizarre pastime.

Since then, he has cast everything from a Honda Civic to a giant toy giraffe, along with over 60 tape men, a handful of women, and a manageable pack of animals?ducks, horses, dogs, pigeons?that could easily fill Noah?s floating arc.

Great Scotch!

In a fictitious campaign for his ?tape people? to propagate their plastic race, Jenkins launched the Storker Project in 2005, in which he figuratively fathered hundreds of transparent babies, left them in precarious locations, and encouraged random pedestrians to bring them home.

To cast his pieces, Jenkins buys a boxful of Super Strength packing tape from 3M. A user-friendly do-it-yourself guide on his website (www.xmarkjenkinsx.com) reveals the simplicity of his process: he wraps the object in saran wrap or clingfilm, covers it in transparent tape, cuts a small slit in the back to remove the object, and then covers the hole with more tape.

Like the most eye-catching examples of illegal graffiti art, Jenkin?s scotch tape sculptures only seek to engage the passer-by with what he self-effacingly calls ?visually compelling litter.? A staunch environmentalist, he would like to believe that his sculptures give plastic litter a new sort of aesthetic.

True enough, the magnificent mess and cosmopolitan chaos of each city remains his faithful, but sometimes fugitive, muse. ?The city becomes my puzzle,? he told The Washington Post in a 2006 interview. ?And my mind is always moving like a Rubik?s cube.?