spyr

It appears my newest art track is found object assemblage. As an avowed collector of things-I-find-on-the-ground (as previously mentioned), I’ve always had the penchant to arrange my finds, but now the impulse has transcended into the consecrated realm of Art. At least in my mind that is.

My current, and biggest work is a room installation (my bedroom) of feathers, fossils, mountain laurel seeds, desert wood, memorabilia, old glass bottles dug up in the yard, antlers, bones, rescued discards, and various other assorted oddments. I created two of the lamps: one out of bits of calcite picked up in Guadalupe Mountain State Park, and another large green glass lamp base that I turned into a lamp of its own right.

Perhaps if we’re still here and in next year’s E.A.S.T., I can show a future permutation of this evolving installation.

Back in 2008 I went down to Padre Island National Seashore on the Texas coast, and was shocked by the amount of plastic flotsam on the beach. With the chronic habit of picking-up-stuff-off-the-ground, I had hoped to encounter some of nature’s marvels, but instead I found myself collecting the detritus of a disposable culture. There was something compelling both in the aesthetics of the degradation (a natural process working upon these mass-produced artifacts) and in the idea of somehow repurposing cast-away garbage that was superseding seashells. In the end, I brought back a sack of salty seaplastic, and didn’t quite know what to do with it.

Going through my “art supplies” a few days ago I came upon this seaplastic and decided something had to happen or it would find its final resting place in a landfill thousands of miles from the effluences and currents from where it was originally discarded. Fortunately, the fate of these scraps turned into “art” (if you will). Here are the results.

And BTW, I was finding tar balls way before they were mainstream.