The Manchester Enterprise
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
Discarded items put to use
One man's junk is another man's artwork
By Alana West, Special Writer
PUBLISHED: April 19, 2007
Talent and creativity teamed up with conservation at Elements Gallery in Manchester as artists created art from materials intended for the rubbish heap.
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Linda Herrst, the gallery's new director, said all entries for the contest, called "Upcycle," will be judged by gallery patrons. The top entry will be named Sunday in celebration of Earth Day.
On April 13, the gallery also hosted a Funky Friday the 13th party in which the artwork of Nina Friday and Brian Cunningham was featured.
"(The artists) took a wild look at things," Herrst said. "It will be neat for kids to come down and take a look. These (pieces of art) are made from things you can find around your house."
Among the items created included several folk-art-type handbags made by Chrisa Crag out of grocery bags. The handbags were painted with acrylics to look leathery and the pieces hand-sewn together.
Other items included a robot comprised, in part, from the compression ball of a toilet and several mosaics made from such varying materials as automotive parts, botanicals, scrap paper and matte board, broken tile, bits of wire, foam, sand paper and cloth.
Maryann Fielder fashioned a handbag from bark cloth, a vintage fabric woven with pieces of bark to get a rough texture, from which her mother made into drapes for her picture windows in 1951. The brightly-colored cloth, covered with sprays of red flowers, was paired with dark green walls, Fielder remembers.
"My husband said that the handbag was too cute, and (the fabric) means too much to me that I would never be able to sell it. So, I kept the first one and made another to sell," said Fielder, who creates cloth wall-hangings that are pieced together like quilts.
Nancy Feldcamp made a mosaic by cutting apart two paintings created in watercolor, her usual medium and pieced together into something new.
"The two paintings were not working as well as I wanted," said Feldcamp, who said she had painted them a decade ago and they were still hanging around in her studio. "The paintings were related in color. That was helpful."
Feldcamp creates both fanciful and traditional landscapes, most often in vivid color. Her current experiment in design and color is sheep, which are not white in any of her paintings.
"I chose sheep because I know a little about sheep," she said.
Debora Spring, who usually creates lively, colorful landscapes in pastels and oils, created a piece she titled "Recycled Reflections of Nature," which was made up of varying colors of plastic bags layered inside an inch-thick Plexiglass frame to create a landscape.
"It was fun to do," Spring said.
She recently finished a showing of her art at the Croswell Opera House in Adrian.
Peter Lynch, who creates one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture from wood in his shop, carved a box from a discarded 2-foot-by-6-foot piece of construction lumber. He added a detail of cherry wood, and a divider of gancola alves wood in the center for added interest to the piece.
When he was finished creating the three-toned box, he filled both sides of the box with white sawdust left from sending holly wood through a planer.
"I thought the holly looked interesting," Lynch said. "If you say it looks Japanese, then my intention came through ... I wanted to take crude waste and refine it."
He said much of his pieces are tactile. He deliberately did not sand smooth the pegs sticking out on the sides.
"I want someone to pick it up and touch it," he said.
Maureen Salazar made a huge mosaic picture filled with bits and pieces from many objects she has picked up during walks, from auto parts and pieces of rust to parts of plants, and scrap paper.
"I used all kinds of techniques," Salazar said. "I always look for things."
"This is the kind of thing I love to do. I can get lost in it," she said.
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