5 lessons I have learned from recycle art:
1. You will see beauty where others see rubbish.
And sometimes you will have to look through the rubbish before you find the beauty. Risk looking messy and stupid. Only you would know what you are doing, but keep at it.
2. You will look like a mad person, and then like a genius. Don't let either label get into your head.
After removing the straw from coconuts I would keep the straw. I just knew I would need it for a portrait sometime, since it looked like real straw and didn't rot. In a similar fashion I stored old fabric scraps from a tailor friend. Different colours of packing tape. That pair of broken sunshades I had loved so much. I had to stash them in a corner of my little house where visitors don't get to see them and refresh the name-calling - it was already enough that I had natty dreadlocks😂
By the time I was done with the flower portrait in the first photo, I had to stop my head from swelling lol! What started as a demo for a curious visitor turned out to be one of my loveliest pieces. She awed and hyped me all evening. I didn't dare to reproduce the frame for fear of disappointing, of coming down from that pedestal.
3. You may have to take everything down and start all over again. Maybe many times over.
Allow yourself the patience and grace to make mistakes and learn from them, and start afresh. Try your best to keep them reversible so you can retrace your steps often, but also forgive yourself the graver ones and give them meaning. Not everything is learned from theory. Growth is organic and iterative.
4. Don't give/sell to someone what you would not keep for yourself.
Aka do unto others. I would hold on to these frames so much that it would seem like I wasn't running a business, or running one at a loss. But it was a good sign if you ask me. Not only had I infused so much love into making them that people could feel it, but I would also not be a loser for keeping them if they didn't sell. Their value did not have commercial origins.
5. Leave it better than you met it, or leave it alone.
If using a resource will damage it instead of adding its value, you might as well leave it where you saw it, for someone else to make better use. You become responsible for whatever your hand decides to harvest. Even the scraps you pick will have their own scraps by the end of your work, which you will have to manage. Be mindful of objects. They have a life of their own, for the Carbon that they carry. Sometimes you may have to take a stone back to the hill where you picked it, and let it be where it knows how to be.
There could be many more if I let myself think about it, but I'll just sit with these 5 for a bit. Hopefully they make sense to you too :)
#recycleart