Four Great Artists Sculpting with Recyclables: Eco Living Articles: Eco20/20

Four Great Artists Sculpting with Recyclables

You've got plenty of company if you've ever seen a pile of trash labeled 'art' and decided anyone who'd believe that was art must have bugs chewing on their sense of reality. But trash can be used in sculptures that are impressive, enchanting, or enlightening. If you think it can't, try giving these artists a Google.

Enlightening

o Creepy; but enlightening. In London, Tim Noble and Sue Webster are artistic partners famous for creating shadow sculptures built of trash. If you look only at the rubbish they've piled, it's impossible to believe it's anything more than another load of high-priced roach bait. But when a projector is set at just the right angle, the light reveals detail-perfect silhouettes. Shadows so eerily crisp you would swear it could only be a trick. You can't help but suspect one, in particular, must actually be the shadow of a motorcycle set behind canvas, illuminated from behind by a hidden light. The only problem with that theory is the shadow is projected on a solid wall.

Enchanting

o Another British artist, Ptolemy Elrington, builds mythical and reality-based creatures from car hubcaps, broken shopping carts and rejected pots and pans. From shopping carts, he shaped a crayfish whose tail is an assembly of wheel brackets and whose body is made from the wider steel sections. The crayfish is part of a commission from Anglian Water, a company which hired Ptolemy to create designs from the debris cleared from rivers, canals and reservoirs in their service area during a clean-up campaign. Those sculptures depict British wildlife returning to their habitats as water quality improves. The artist's hubcap sculptures include a rhino, birds, fish, a Husky-dog, and a joyfully frisky-looking 200-hubcap dragon.

Impressive

o Dr. Evermor's art park, in Wisconsin, proudly displays the world's largest metal sculpture: the "Forevertron". Weighing in at 320 tons, it has the look of a thing Willy Wonka might covet for making cocktail sausages from "vermicious knids". Dr Evermor is the Forevertron's fictional creator and heaven-bound traveler. Tom Every, formerly a professional wrecking and salvage expert, actually created the apparatus as the central attraction of one of the most amazing Steampunk sculpture parks in the world. Several important bits of historical salvage are welded into the Forevertron, including the decontamination chamber from the Apollo space mission and dynamos constructed by Thomas Edison. Most of the rest is salvage from the 1920's. Also to be found in the park is a fifteen ton "Juicer Bug" along with something entitled the "Celestial Listening Ear", plus 70 sculptures comprising the "Bird Band" and much more.

If you never had that sort of skill, but you'd like to try your own hand at recyclables art, old license plates can be bent into colorful mailboxes and birdhouses, old highway signs can be folded into lawn furniture, and old bike chains can be wound and welded to look like baskets. If you stand among the artistically hopeless, you'll just have to stick to using old coffee cans to keep toilet paper dry on camping trips.