|
By Sally Willowbee
From
Trashy Women: From Plastic Bags to Heavy Metal, Women Who Make
Art from Recycled Materials.
 Most days, Margaret Giancola can be
found squeezed into the center of her living room couch; bags
full of colorful balls piled high
around her. This is her work place. She spends her days and sometimes
her nights, cutting long, inch wide, strips from plastic bags;
rolling the strips into balls like yarn; and filing them according
to color in their designated storage bag. This is her raw material
and her palette from which she chooses her colors to crochet
her beautiful rugs.
Margaret's paints are the many colors of
plastic bags and plastic tablecloths; sometimes bright, sometimes
muted,
sometimes with
random splashes of abstract color produced by the store name
and logo. Margaret crochets the history of our material culture
and
consumerism into her rugs. The story is told by the single crocheted
row of K-Mart bags no longer available; by Shop Rite’s
new bags providing a new abundance of yellow, by the bright colors
of plastic tablecloths.
 Margaret is a connoisseur of plastic
bags. Some bags don’t
crochet well; some plastic bags are too thick, some too thin,
and some too stretchy. These are the ones she uses to put out
her trash.
Eleven years ago, Margaret worked as a health
care provider for a woman whose medical condition brought in large
quantities
of
plastic bags. She started with the idea of making place mats,
but after experimenting she decided to crochet a rug much
like
the
ones she had made from rags and old silk stockings during
the depression. An energetic and alert woman in her 80’s,
she has plans to continue crocheting rugs until she is at least
120 years old. These
rugs are her legacy to future generations. They will last forever
and they don’t fade, shrink, or slip.
Margaret Giancola
could be the poster-woman of the recycling movement. Her
work sends a message to wake up and think about
our culture’s
legacy. A creative and concerned older woman who wears sensible
clothes and sneakers, she makes a regular tour of her neighborhood
trashcans; searching, peering, digging for colorful plastic
bags. She reuses these otherwise thrown-away objects and gives
them a
new meaning, a new life and, ironically, a valued permanence
and usefulness. By recycling them, she interrupts the usual
route from
store to home to landfill where their non-degradable permanence
produces blight far into the future. Margaret crochets a warning
of the fate of our environment.
|
About Sally Willowbee
My story weaves through the narrative,
connecting different parts of mylife: my political beliefs, my spirituality,
my concern about our environment, my feminism, my interest in culture and class,
my creativity, and my humor. I am a lifelong trash-picker and a self-taught
furniture/cabinet maker, often using recycled wood in my creations.
For more than 30 years, I have
taken photos of folk art environments. I love “discovering” art
in front yards, side yards, and backyards. In the fall of 1999, I took a class
called Grass Roots Art Environments at the New School in NYC that inspired
me to begin researching, documenting, interviewing and writing about self-taught
artists. Trashy Women: From Plastic Bags to Heavy Metal, Women Who Make
Art from Recycled Materials, is a presentation illustrated with slides
that grew out of this passion.
|
