Green art
These artists take trash and turn it into treasure. To do so helps the environment.from the Camden Courier Post OnlinePhotos by JOHN ZIOMEK
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
By JUDITH W. WINNE
Courier-Post Staff
With teaspoon arms and gelatin mold torsos, Sally Willowbee's female-figure lamps -- what she cheerfully calls turned-on or illuminated women -- are crafted from pieces others no longer want.
Tossed-out coffee percolator parts. Ditched costume jewelry. Discarded silvery balls that once held loose tea.
"I love seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary, in the worthless," says artist Willowbee, who lives in an 18th-century Deptford farmhouse. "I rescue things. It's seeing the beauty in the unwanted."
For some artists, creating something new from something old is a worthy pursuit. Call it found art, recycled art, creative re-use.
Next month, the Perkins Center for the Arts in Collingswood opens Green Alchemy -- Trash to Treasure: The Dumpster Divers Exhibition, a month-long display devoted to work produced by the Dumpster Divers. A Philadelphia-area group -- Willowbee is part of the clan -- the Divers trash pick their materials.
Diver Neil Benson of Philadelphia says folks bring found pieces to meetings, and artists who see a use for them speak up to claim them.
Object determinism, he calls it. "The object tells you what it wants to be," he explains.
A teacher and committed environmentalist, Benson says glass, metal and plastic -- everything from bottle caps to hard drives and aluminum scrap -- are relatively easy to find.
"Ninety percent of Dumpster diving is done from the outside of the container," says the 54-year-old artist. "You almost never have to go in."
Benson believes in the power of art to change minds and suggests that found art can get viewers thinking about the "trash tsunami," the despoliation of the planet.
Asked what kind of recycled art he makes, he replies, "Show me what you're throwing out."
In Haddon Township, the corner of artist Stacey Douglas' backyard boasts an outdoor fire pit. The kiva, twinkling with mosaic stones, was crafted from leftover concrete, a recycled hubcap and an ancient grate.
Inside the house, Douglas shows a visitor recycled windows whose panes are now showcases for her watercolors. Douglas cleaned up the blue-painted wood frame, but not much.
There's a primitive, roughed-up style, what Douglas calls a beach-cottage look, to this piece and others.
"It's all rustic and worn down," says Douglas, who teaches art in South Jersey to children and adults. "It's lived a life. It's worn. It feels safe and wonderful."
She stored drawerlike boxes in her basement for a decade. These became a repository for symbols of her life, including her creativity. In one cubby of God's Treasure Box, the 44-year-old artist features paint brushes. They are battered, of course, brushes she herself once used.
She has rescued driftwood from the shore of the Cooper River, found old feathers and incorporated her mother's hand-me-down jewelry into her work.
"I've always been into using what I found around," she says.
In Haddonfield, Lydia Hamilton Brown makes what some might consider the ultimate sacrifice -- she slices off pieces of her old paintings to re-use in collages.
"I get tired of looking at them, I guess," she says. "I cut them up, and I recycle them in other projects."
As an art teacher at St. Cecelia's Catholic School in Pennsauken, Brown has enlisted students in making recycled art. Once, she held up a wicker cornucopia, asking how it might be re-imagined, and one inventive boy decided he would craft a warrior.
Brown walks her neighborhood, and like many artists who trash pick, says the bounty is considerable and critical to her art.
"I use pieces of board games, old magazine posters, any kind of graphics, album covers," she says. "
Large Rubbermaid containers in her basement store countless pieces her students can choose as the raw materials of their creations.
She picked up a bag of colorful zippers, pointing out how they might be ideal for a sculpture in need of interesting hair or a three-dimensional mouth.
Deptford's Willowbee says the hunt for raw materials is part of the fun.
"It's treasure that I love," says the 60-year-old artist. "That's part of the trash picking -- the search for gold."
A self-taught woodworker, Willowbee makes elegant and simple tables rimmed with quotations she has saved. One, from a Spanish scientist, says, "Water is the blue soul of the planet."
The phrases are spelled out with Scrabble tiles. Not new, of course.
"The old ones are prettier," she says.
Reach Judith W. Winne at (856) 486- 2441 or jwinne@courierpostline.com
