While searching for a gift for a yoga-loving friend on Etsy, I stumbled upon The Reclamation Project’s page . I’d done a search for the word “Ohm” in product descriptions, and I found this design:
I thought these signs would be beautiful in a home or garden, so I read a little more and found out that all of these pieces are made from rescued trash wood. I was intrigued, and I decided to contact the designer for an interview. Here’s what I found out!
1. What inspired you to start working with reclaimed and recycled materials?
Ever since I can remember, I have been dragging home discards. Found photos, broken fans, thumbtacks, hunks of rusted metal, weathered chunks of wood, you name it, too much of it comes home with me, but too much is left on the street.
I guess too much of my grandparents’ generation rubbed off on me. They were good farm folk raised during the
depression who made everything they could–clothes, food, gifts–people for whom anything over $1.98 was too much. At least, I’ll use them as an excuse for my compulsive hoarding!
For years, I had been trying to figure out what to do with it all as I realized I wasn’t always fixing
what was broken, wasn’t always using what was perfectly usable and wasn’t selling most of it at garage sales, just feeding the increasingly larger and larger free pile outside of my house. I realized that I could make more of a difference by making and selling art created from the waste rather than just working in a non-profit as an administrative assistant.
2. Where do you find your wood?
Free wood is pretty much everywhere. But different kinds of wood end up in different types of places.
Early on I was constantly looking for pallets to make cold frames and raised garden beds, so i haunted industrial areas. I then began to make functional, not decorative, birdhouses and bathouses out of cedar fencing and began to get a lot of wood via Craigslist as people replaced their old fences.
Lately, as I’ve begun to make nature scenes and portraits, I’ve been working with cabinet doors, scraps of shelving and plywood that I mine from the dumpsters in gentrifying neighborhoods, which has led to some interesting conversations with homeowners. Most recently, I’ve run across some bamboo plyboard that I’ve have good luck with in my repeatable, 3 Lil Birds [Bamboo] .
3. I noticed many of your pieces are Eastern-influenced. What is your connection to Eastern thought?
I’ve always been drawn to cultures that put a premium on preserving the natural to provide for the future. When I was in middle school I was introduced to Taoism and the I-Ching, which slowly led me toward seeing the poetic inevitablity of the natural world. All things decay, all processes of respiration and life produce waste, yet from this decay springs forth life, balancing the system.
Right now, I’m reading “Farmers of Forty Centuries” which is a travelogue of pre-industrial age Japanese, Korean and Chinese agricultural practices at the turn of the Twentieth Century. At first glance, the culture seems very pastoral, a slow-paced peasant life, but further studying shows how efficient an agricultural machine they were, all waste being used to maximize each parcel of land. All outputs became inputs for the next growing season. Through this reclamation, one can sense the cultural reverence they have for nature and leads me to emphasize the weathering, oxidation and inevitable patination that decay toward life brings.
4. Can you tell us a little about your process when you’re designing a piece?
Materials always dictate design for me. I don’t try to make old materials look new again, so I have to find subject matter that relates thematically to the weathering but also to the average person. And since I find that more people relate to something illustrative rather than abstracted, I make carvings of animals, positive messages in the form of Asian characters and nature scenes, sticking to simple and basic forms that allow the weathering to have equal prominence.
Mostly, I spend time looking at the wood for patterns in the grain and knots and colors I can manipulate. For larger works I use the viewing of them as a place to talk about the context of how or why I am able to make art from these specific materials.
Recently, I have had shows with carved portraits taken from photos I find in neighborhoods in the process of
gentrification. These I use to examine parallels between the way our society excessively consumes and discards products and how we similarly disregard our heritage and memories, historical integrity, cultural values and belief systems.
I also make Heads_on_Sticks, garden stakes with funny or poignant names, from 4 X 4 blocks and construction hardware. I do a lot of sorting of these little bits until the face of a character appears to me. So I try to stay open to what the materials want to “become” as I reuse them.
5. Is there anything else you’d like to say about your work or your commitment to remaining sustainable?
If anything, making art and craft out of reclaimed materials has given me a place to help educate others to recycle and reuse more in their own life. I do a lot of street fairs and talk to as many people about what they are going to make as I do to people who are buying things. That makes me happy.
See more at The Reclamation Project .
