While a growing number of craftsmen are working with other people’s discards, Recology, a California resource recovery company, actually pays artists to turn trash into art.

In 1990 Recology began a unique art and education program. The company selected artists to work full time for four months in a large, well-equipped studio next to its transfer station in San Francisco. The transfer station is located within a 46-acre property that includes several recycling facilities and the public disposal area (aka “the dump”). Most of San Francisco’s garbage  is temporarily stored at this site before moving on to a landfill elsewhere in California.
 
Recology changed its name from Norcal Waste Systems in 2009 to reflect its corporate culture and values. More than a private, employee-owned waste management company, the company wants to encourage people to reuse material, think about new ways to conserve resources, and support local, professional artists.

Artists are selected by an advisory board of environmentalists, artists and curators; each recipient receives a $1,000 monthly grant to cover basic personal bills.

At the end of each residency, the company holds a free public reception and exhibition of the artist’s work in the company’s studio. As visitors enter, they are confronted with a mountain of trash. They then see how imagination turns discards into meaningful objects. 
 
The artists roam the  public disposal area with shopping carts, collecting different types of trash. One may look for furniture, trinkets, photos and other personal objects, for found object collages, while another looks for raw materials such as wood, painted metal or wire for assemblage.

Some of the trash art is exhibited permanently in Recology’s three-acre sculpture garden atop a hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay. The garden is located between the garbage and recycling facilities and the Little Hollywood neighborhood. Many pieces from the program are also exhibited in office buildings, schools and other public or private spaces in the city. The garden is a stop for students on one of the 160 tours held throughout the year. 

A new exhibit, “The Art of Recology” can now be seen in the United Terminal at the San Francisco International Airport. Celebrating the Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence program, it presents over 100 works by 45 artists, made during the time they worked in the studio at the Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Facility. It will be on public view through October 27. Below are images of art included in this exhibit.

To learn more, visit the Recology website.

Terry Dame is an adventurous, experimental musician. A multi-instrumentalist, she composes music for concert halls, film, video, circus and dance — all on instruments (percussion, string and wind) that she designs and builds herself from recycled materials.

Daughter of a piano teacher, Dame played piano and trumpet before studying engineering at the University of Massachusetts where she graduated with a degree in Environmental Design. After working in an environmental planning office for a year, she bought a synthesizer and began composing and performing with a local theater company.

In 1985 Dame moved to New York City, composing and performing with small groups throughout the city. In 1995, she moved to California to attend the California Institute of the Arts where she studied composition, saxophone, and Balinese gamelan along with Persian and Hindustani music; she received an MFA in composition and performance in 1997.

Dame built her first instrument, a rubber-band harp called the Rubarp, while studying in California. After graduation, on returning to New York, she realized she could find materials in the city streets and continued to work mostly with recycled finds.

“I have always been concerned and interested in environmental issues, alternative energy, sustainability and recycling,” she said.

For nearly ten years, she directed and played with a percussion-based quartet, Electric Junkyard Gamelan, which toured and played original compositions on frying pans, saw blades, clay pots and a variety of hybrid instruments. “The nature of the materials makes the instruments visually interesting, and although my music is out of the ordinary, it remains accessible,” Dame said. “I think the combo is appealing to people.”

She noted that replacing instruments at short notice can be difficult. On one tour, drummer Lee Frisari “finally broke through the bottom of the 30-gallon garbage can we used as a kick drum. We had several shows ahead of us on the tour but I was hell bent on not buying a new can,” she said. They were in rural western Massachusetts and Dame’s sister, who lives there, “paraded us around to her neighbors who graciously let us poke through their barns, banging away on garbage cans until we found one that had the right tone.”

When the Electric Junkyard Gamelan went on hiatus, Dame moved on to an interactive solo project called Electron Gong. “My goal with this new project is to explore ways to humanize our interaction with technology and manifest the ideas in a creative way,” she said.

She currently performs on handmade electronic instruments monthly at the Branded Saloon in Brooklyn on “Weird Wednesday” which features “instrument inventors and players of the oddity,” many of whom also incorporate found or repurposed materials.

Dame also plays saxophone with “Monkey on a Rail,” a new-music ensemble; “Zapote,” a six-piece Latin samba band; and Paprika, a six-piece international dance music ensemble. She is an instructor in New York’s School of Visual Arts, a freelance music and sound editor for the fashion industry, and produces recordings for her performing groups and numerous film and video scores.

For more information about Terry Dame, visit her website.

Nina Katchadourian is an American artist who works in many media —photography, video and sculpture, to mention a few. She often travels throughout the US and around the world for art projects and exhibitions of her work, as well as to teach, lecture and visit her far-flung family.
She began a series of photographs, digital images, video and sound called Seat Assignment in 2010 spontaneously, on a trip between New York to Atlanta. Instead of experiencing the flight passively as simply a means to get from point A to point B, she decided to use the time and space to create art. Her props were restricted to travelers’ supplies found on the plane and those she normally brings in carry-on bags.

The project comes from what Katchadourian calls her “optimism about the artistic potential that lurks within the mundane.”

After a year into the Seat Assignment project, in 2011 she began working on a series of Flemish-style self-portraits which she took in airplane lavatories, dressing up in costumes created on the spot. For instance, crinkled tissue paper seat protector covers became a lace-like head covering and collar; a case from the in-flight pillow became a hat; and her black traveling shawl became a backdrop. Trying not to inconvenience fellow passengers while spending 10-15 minutes at a time in the restroom, she did this when most people were sleeping.

Katchadourian prefers to use the a cell phone camera, with limited technical capabilities, rather than a standard camera because she doesn’t want anyone to pay attention to what she is doing.”I’m much more interested in looking like someone who’s just bored and trying to pass the time messing around with her phone,” she said. “It lets me get away with a lot more to do it on the phone.”

She reviews and selects images to be included in her series after leaving the plane. None of her images are significantly altered after they are taken. Other themes include portraits of people reflected in seatbelt buckles, images of her sweater folded to resemble a gorilla, and sculptural mini-provisional shelters from stacked crackers, used food packaging and folded paper.

Katchadourian has continued to explore new ways to work with a limited number of materials while flying, without drawing attention to herself or what she is doing. As of March 2013, she has created thousands of images during more than 90 flights and discovered that many can be organized into themes, although she works on many ideas and different styles of images during one flight. She derives landscapes and unusual creatures by arranging images torn from in-flight magazines in a composition flat on her tray table — occasionally she will add orange peels, peanuts, lifesavers or other random textures — and then takes a picture of it.

A cross section of the entire Seat Assignment series can be seen in the above video and on her website. Courtesy of the artist and the Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

Sculptor Morgan MacLean sees beauty in then paper bags and plastic water bottles that litter our streets and landscapes.

Because most of us have lived with them all our lives and have become dependent on them, we take these carriers for granted. The paper grocery bag was invented in 1852 to make life more convenient for shoppers who didn’t have to remember cloth bags. Plastic milk containers and bottles became popular with manufacturers in the early 1960s because they were less expensive to produce and ship than glass bottles.

MacLean has been interested in design and coaxing shapes from different materials most of his life. In high school, he was an apprentice in a glass studio. After majoring in sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design, MacLean made architectural models in architect Frank Gehry’s office in California, where he now lives and works in his own sculpture studio.

MacLean’s Urban Remnants series, an homage to the design and form of products behind our cash-and-carry culture, presents abstracted disposable containers carved in sustainably grown and harvested wood. His work, intended to raise public awareness about shapes and habits taken for granted, also has affected his family. Recently his young daughter handed him an empty container and said, “You can make this into a sculpture.”

It is ironic that MacLean’s memorials to our disposable, mass-produced, tossed-out containers are painstakingly made by hand with hand saws, chisels and rasps. The process is also time-consuming: It takes two months of working at least eight hours a day to create one bag approximately the same size as an original — an elegantly designed heirloom representing our current culture.

Visit Morgan McLean’s website to see more of his work.

Sarah Turner, a British artist known for creating lighting and sculpture from discarded plastic soda bottles, is becoming known through her commissions displayed in popular public spaces.

For the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, she created five 6-1/2-foot-tall chandeliers, one 29-1/2-foot-tall sculpture and fifteen 16-inch-by-12-inch floral centerpieces from recycled Coca Cola bottles for the company’s hospitality pavilion. The company was pleased with the results, and after the Olympics, she has continued to create more centerpieces for Coca Cola.

Turner is among a growing number of artists who prefer working with waste materials rather than unused ones.

“I find it a greater challenge,” she said. “I try my best to use as little new materials as possible in my work.”

As a child, Turner made things from discards, and the interest continued. In school, she began experimenting with plastic bottles and, because she worked in a coffee shop that served soft drinks, she brought home two large bags of empty bottles diverted from the trash each day. She elected to write a dissertation on recycling after studying Furniture and Product Design in college.

Viewers may not realize that Turner’s work begins in the trash bin, because she transforms each bottle from transparent to opaque by sandblasting. “This makes the material feel a lot more high- quality and diffuses light well,” she said. She sometimes dyes the bottles bright colors and then cuts and sculpts them into intricate forms.

In addition to teaching part-time at Nottingham Trent University, where she went to school, Turner is currently working on commissions to create a large chandelier that looks like flowers and additional chandeliers made with melted plastic bottles for an exhibit, Eco Build at the Excel London in March. She will also exhibit at Tent London for this year’s Design Festival in September 2013.

Working with discards provides a double whammy for her work — transformed trash enhances the message propelling her works.

A chance encounter with a “gigantic” house spider inspired jewelry maker Justin Gershenson-Gates to turn broken watches into whimsical insects.

“We were on vacation at a lake house in Michigan this summer when I saw the biggest spider ever – it must have been living there for years and years,” Gershenson-Gates recalls. “I couldn’t really kill it, so I put it in a cup and took it outside.”

As he watched his captive walk away, it occurred to Gershenson-Gates that its legs resembled the skeletal hands that he had been making out of recycled watch parts. The hand is just one of the pendants in his line of jewelry that includes hearts, dragonflies and geometrical shapes. He also crafts cufflinks and “gearrings” from the delicate innards of old timepieces in his home studio in Chicago.

Gershenson-Gates started in the jewelry business about two years ago after he discovered reclaimed watch parts as a medium.

“I’ve always been a sculptor, and I’ve always been fascinated with mechanical things, so watches seemed like the perfect art material,” he says. “I like doing something different.”

He has only been selling his insects since July, both online through his website, and at craft fairs. While his pendants sell for between $40 and $100, the bugs are $200 and up, because of the amount of time they involve. Each insect takes between three and 12 hours to make, and Gershenson-Gates can turn out 10 to 12 in a good week. But it’s the search for materials to repurpose that is most time-consuming.

“People know what I do, and they bring me their old dead watches,” he says. “Places that buy gold watches strip the gold off and throw away the rest, so I pick those up. But I spend 50 to 60 percent of my time looking for parts.”

And not just any old parts. His bird pendant is made from parts of a certain kind of watch made in the 1880s and ’90s — and each one requires deconstructing two watches to complete. When he can’t find the exact discarded parts he is looking for, he may make something different out of what he has.

“I started making the insects in part because I didn’t have any other use for the watch stems, and I had plenty of them around,” he says.

In large cities and tiny villages it’s a universal question — what to do with loose plastic bags?

This plastic problem is pressing for James Nampushi, an honored Maasai warrior from a village in Kenya. He currently lives in South Carolina while working on a Ph.D. in Parks Management at Clemson University.

Nampushi, whose tribe traditionally lives off cattle exclusively, says that he “considers cows our life partners.” He has seen both cows and wildlife in the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya die after eating discarded plastic bags.

The problem of plastic bag pollution is so great in the African country that in 2007, Kenya banned the use of very thin plastic bags, the kind commonly used by grocery stores. In early 2012, the government banned the manufacture and importation of very thin plastic bags, but they still litter the environment in huge numbers.

In February 2012, Nampushi contacted Chris Gustin, a weaver in Indiana who creates rag rugs from recycled fabrics and has written about weaving with plastic bags, to discuss his ideas for combating the problem at home. He said he discovered her while researching potential solutions on the Web.

After speaking with Nampushi several times on the phone, Gustin invited him to her studio for free lessons so that he would be able to introduce weaving with plastic in Kenya. On December 16, Nampushi, who had never woven before, arrived for two 12-hour days of lessons. He quickly learned the techniques and made a small rug, a runner and several coasters.

Nampushi hopes to establish a cottage industry to collect the plastic bags from the land, process them into usable form, and weave products to sell to local hotels and businesses in his area. He has already received interest from several hotels in a prototype of a lunch bag for tourists to carry on photo safaris.

Visit Chris Gustin’s site to learn about both her weaving and James Nampushi.

Art might not save the planet, but it can help keep it green.

At least that’s the philosophy of John Sabraw, who has launched the Green World Art website to promote sustainable practices in making art.

“The single global issue that I can have the most impact on is sustainability,” writes Sabraw, who teaches art at Ohio University in Athens, on the site. “Personally, my ultimate goal is to develop completely sustainable art product, practice and process without compromising any aspect of creativity or conservation.”

He certainly walks the talk. Sabraw uses water-based paints and dry pigments and paints on durable, flexible aluminum panels usually used for exterior commercial signs. The frames are made from organically grown, sustainably harvested bamboo, sealed with formaldehyde-free clear coat. The light weight of the finished pieces also reduces the carbon footprint of shipping them to galleries.

Sabraw’s goal is to make his works and his life as carbon-neutral as possible, and to help other artists become aware of the impact they have on the natural world. The Art Offset Calculator on the Green World Art website factors in everything that goes into creating a work – from electricity and gas to power the studio to art supplies, travel and shipping — to determine how many metric tons of carbon dioxide were produced in the process.

Sabraw estimates that by creating 250 works over 15 years, he was responsible for 12.2 metric tons of CO2 emissions. (You can follow his calculations here. He also calculated that the Mona Lisa has been responsible for 3.55 metric tons of CO2, and he bought carbon offset credits from carbonfund.org to make the 16th-century work carbon neutral.

Sabraw’s ongoing series of paintings, Chroma, explores natural phenomena, the earth’s ecosystem as a whole, and the role of humans within it, through the natural interaction of his materials. He layers paints and pigments with different viscosities, then allows them to interact with each other and the environment over days, weeks or months. The resulting abstracts strike a balance between controlled and organic processes.

“You have to give yourself over to being in the process itself,” he said. “If you have an ideal image in mind, you’re going to be frustrated.”

But Sabraw is also interested in interacting with the environment in a larger way. He has teamed up with a professor of civil engineering at OU to produce artist-grade paints from runoff from southeast Ohio’s many old coal mines. Environmental scientists have worked for years to clean up the region’s waterways that have become too acidic for wildlife because of contamination from iron and other heavy metals.

“The dream of a useful paint made from mine runoff remediation, whose sales can offset the cost of remediation, is one step closer to realization,” Sabraw told OU writer Andrea Gibson recently.

Sabraw frequently exhibits at the Thomas McCormick Gallery in Chicago and the Kathryn Markel Gallery in New York. His work has been collected by individuals, corporations and institutions around the world.

Chris Jordan has been a busy guy this year.

As part of the 2011 Prix Pictet Commission that he won in March, the Seattle-based photographer spent 12 days in Kenya working with non-governmental organizations that support community-led conservation and sustainable community development programs. He called the photographs he made on that trip “Ushirikiano,” a Swahili word that means partnership, collaboration, or community of shared interest.

In his artist’s statement about the project, he wrote: “The challenges faced by the rural villagers of Kenya are like a microcosm for the rest of the world; like us, they are called on to join in new forms of collaboration if they wish to survive and thrive in these turbulent times.”

Jordan’s interest in threats to the global environment are truly global, taking him from the parched plains of Kenya to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He began documenting the world’s overconsumption in 2005 with his series “Intolerable Beauty” and “Running the Numbers,” in which he created striking images depicting the staggering amounts of garbage created every day in the United States.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Jordan traveled to New Orleans to document the destruction on a personal scale, but he also saw that project as an extension of his work on over-consumerism, with the severity of the storm linked to global warming.

Jordan continues to explore these themes in a film called “Midway,” based on the photographic series that won him the Prix Pictet Commission, “Message from the Gyre.” The photos and the film document the impact of ocean-borne plastic on the albatross that nest on Midway Island.

The stark photos show the contents of dead birds’ stomachs: disposable lighters, combs, toothbrushes, bottle caps – detritus of the modern world that floats on the surface where they birds feed. The parents ingest these items, then feed them to their chicks. When the indigestible plastic eventually leaves no room for actual food, the chicks die.

Jordan says his purpose in making “Midway” is not so much to save the albatross as to help amplify the “urgent alarm signal they are sending us about the state of our world,” he told Outside Online in June.

“The birds on Midway are like messengers, the canary in the coal mine,” Jordan said. “When the canary dies, the miners don’t run over and try to save the canary — they receive the message that bird just gave its life delivering, and then act quickly to save themselves.”

The film raised $100,000 for production costs through Kickstarter in July. Jordan now anticipates a release date in late 2013 or early 2014.

ScrapArtsMusic — the brainchild of Gregory Kozak, a Canadian musician schooled in jazz and world music and Justine Murdy, an architect and artistic producer — bestows the phoenix-gift of improbable yet dynamic, foot-stomping sound, on post-consumer waste originally headed for the Vancouver landfill.

Chalk it up to Kozak’s deep motivation to pursue a fulfilling musical path that also honors his green leanings. The longtime professional percussionist and composer, contemplating the sheer volume of unwanted trash that clutters construction sites, basements, garages and metal shops, decided to breathe new life into scrap.

For the past 14 years, the avant-garde musician has assembled new instruments from salvaged materials he spreads on the floor. When satisfied with the shape, he joins the components with welding skills he learned at a local community college. Among the 145 innovative instruments that Kozak has handcrafted are: Whorlies: ribbed flexible plastic hose producing a variety of pitches depending on the speed used by the musicians to spin them; an Annoy-O-Phone made from dishwasher hose, bagpipe reeds and a balloon; and a Plankophone marimba made from 2″ x 4″ and 2″ x 6″ planks of wood which can be played by up to six people at a time. Kozak also writes music for the instruments and the entire ensemble of professional musicians develops techniques to play them — creating a varied range of sounds for each instrument.

Delivering the all-encompassing sensory stimulation of a live Broadway experience, ScrapArtsMusic collectively channels enthusiasm, energy, and creative spirit into every one of their thumping-pumping choreographed performances. The group was featured in the high-octane closing ceremonies for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. And to think … it all started with a heap of junk!

To learn more about ScrapArtsMusic, visit their website.