Artists who work with found materials think differently from most of us. An artist friend, who works with "trash", asked her husband to stop the car when they were driving on a highway. She had seen a pile of discards on the side of the road. "Art supplies, honey," she explained. Continually amazed by how they see things and what they create, we love to share their work and ideas with you. Here are three more who think way outside the box.
At age 91, Vollis Simpson is a self-taught artist who continues to assemble spectacular sculptures (many of which, move) from scrap metal and metal parts, and develops larger audiences every year. (This April The New York Times wrote a story about him and his work.)
Photo by New York Times. Vollis Simpson in his workshop.
Simpson started out fixing things that broke down on the farm, and worked in the equipment repair business from the time he returned from service in World War II until his retirement in the 1980s. Now he creates sculptures, windmills and whirligigs out of old fans, washing machine parts, recycled steel and aluminum and other junkyard finds. His garden in Lucama, North Carolina, includes over 20 whirligigs, from foot-tall miniatures up to 50 feet tall. "I had a lot of junk and had to do something with it," he said.
His work became known to a wider world when Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, founder of the American Visionary Art Museum located in Baltimore's Inner Harbor, invited him to provide an outdoor sculpture for its permanent collection in time for the museum's opening in 1995, He came up with one you can't miss--it is three stories high and weighs three tons. Since then he has been invited to exhibit his work at a variety of sites including the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and a Christmas window for Bergdorf Goodman's department store in Manhattan in 2009.
One of Vollis Simpson's smaller whirligigs at AVAM.
With the growing green movement, and the ease of presenting any creation to the world through the Internet, artists working with found materials are gaining much wider recognition. In the tradition of all artists who have recycled discards, they re-use what's at hand, but in the 21st century, they’re much more likely to have access to discarded aluminum cans and cassette tapes than weathered barnwood or bits of rusted-out tractor. It’s all about the lifestyle and whether you live in the city or countryside.
Pink Tab Bikini Top made from Tab soda cans, dryer vents and rivets by Ingrid Goldbloom Bloch.
Ingrid Goldbloom Bloch of Massachusetts, a self-taught artist, finds her inspiration in the hardware store, transforming nuts and washers into teapots and soda cans and fishing line into ladies’ lingerie. Since 1995, her work has been featured in several exhibits which have toured throughout the U.S. For more information, visit her website.
Bob Dylan, cassette tape on canvas by Erika Iris Simmons.
Kurt Cobain, cassette tape on canvas by Erika Iris Simmons.
Erika Iris Simmons, a self-taught artist from Atlanta, was waiting tables in 2008 when she was inspired to repurpose some old cassette tapes into portraits of musicians. Her “Ghost in the Machine” gallery has grown to almost 50 now, and she is now exploring paper works and what she calls “Remixes,” reusing discarded or donated materials to create new portraits. Her artist’s statement could be the mantra for the recycled art material movement: “I love the nostalgia of the archaic and I hope that not everything which has outlived its use goes to waste.” For more information, visit her website.
Found Art Helped Sustain Japanese-Americans in WWII Camps
Eleven weeks after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered 120,000 ethnic Japanese living in the United States — more than two-thirds of whom were American citizens — to liquidate their businesses, leave their homes, and move from coastal cities into 10 bleak, inland detention camps for the duration of World War ll.
The internees brought whatever they could carry and settled into barracks furnished with only a pot belly stove and one light bulb per family. They set about making their new homes habitable with whatever was available. They hunted for scrap wood left over from building the camps, improvised tools, and built furniture, clothes hangars, cutlery, children’s toys, jewelry, paintings, musical instruments and games from what they found.
Art school held in a recreation hall at Manzanar, a camp in California.
Camp populations came from all walks of life; about half were under 17 years old. The adults organized classes so the children could keep up with their education and shared their “how-to” skills with others. Whoever had a skill taught it, and both teachers and students found emotional escape through the creation of practical objects as well as remarkable artworks.
None of the internees was ever charged with a crime, but after the war, they returned to their homes with no jobs waiting for them. Most put their camp belongings away, including the artwork they had made, and moved on with their lives. The artwork would have been totally forgotten except for Delphine Hirasuna, a third-generation Japanese-American who writes books about design-related topics.
Hirasuna’s American parents had been exiled, but didn’t talk about their camp experience. After her mother died, she discovered a small wooden pin in the shape of a bird packed away in a box in the garage. She learned that it had been carved in the camp, and that other families had similar “lost” artifacts. During extensive research, Hirasuna discovered more than 150 artifacts and wrote about this period in the 2005 book “The Art of Gaman.” Gaman is a Japanese word that means to bear the seemingly unbearable with dignity and patience.
Shell brooches and corsages by Shigeko Shintaku, Iwa Miura and Grace Ayako Ito made in camps in Tule Lake, California, and Topaz, Utah. Using screens, internees sifted out tiny shells from nearby dry lake beds, then bleached and painted them. In the absence of real flowers, shells were assembled into corsages for weddings and funerals and made into jewelry and larger table displays. Terry Heffernan photos.
Carved stone teapot by Homei Iseyama made from slate stones found in the area of Camp Topaz in Utah. The artist first chipped out a rough form in the rock slab and then carved, sanded and polished out the shape and design. Terry Heffernan photo.
To educate a new generation of Americans about the internment experience, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized an exhibition, “The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942-1946,” and asked Hirasuna to curate it. The exhibit will remain at the Renwick Gallery through January 30, 2011.
Heath Nash Explores the Plasticity of Plastic
Most of us see empty plastic containers as trash, or at best, candidates for the recycling bin. South African artist Heath Nash uses discarded bottles that once held detergent, bleach or milk to create wondrous 3-D lampshades now sold throughout the world.
Nash’s affinity for container plastic didn’t develop overnight. It evolved from his childhood love of folding paper and cardboard. In art school he studied sculpture and worked out design problems by folding paper. After graduation he applied his paper trial-and-error approach to sheets of plastic — with a system of dye-cut panels he designed himself. Clever, but international buyers told him the lampshades he made didn’t look “South African enough.”
However, recycling is part of the South African craft tradition. After studying the work of self-taught artists who made flowers from plastic waste and wire, Nash realized that he could use his technical skills and the talents of local craftsmen to recycle plastics into lampshades that would sell.
In 2004 he started “Other People’s Rubbish,” a new line of repeatable designs from recycled plastic. It consists mainly of intricate lampshades made from hand-bent wire parts and hand-cut plastic forms, many in the shapes of flowers, butterflies, and leaves. They range in size from 15.75 inches in diameter covered with 240 applied shapes to 31.5 inches in diameter that require 1,200 appliqués. Since then Nash’s eco-friendly shades have been exhibited in Cape Town, London, Tokyo, Milan, Vienna, Finland and Zimbabwe.
Nash and his design team work in his studio and production space near the center of Cape Town. As their products have become more popular, they needed a steady supply of more materials. Nash has shifted responsibility for the increasingly larger task of collecting, cleaning, and cutting prescribed shapes from the used plastic bottles to another local company, creating more jobs in the community while diverting more waste from the landfills.
If you’ve enjoyed The Recycling Rag but wished it would arrive in your inbox a little more often, you’ll be happy to know Eco-Artware now has a blog, Eco-Artware-Notes, updated twice a week with tidbits from all over the Art Eco webiverse. Check it out, and feel free to add your comments and start a conversation.
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