Tag Archives: reuse

Activism, Artwork, Environmentalism, Ethics, Sustainability, Way of the Scavenger

Hello, Old Paint

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Today is an art day. I’m bouncing between a few custom orders and what I call “cleaning through art”. That latter is where I realize the back bedroom where I keep my art supplies is a complete mess, and instead of cleaning everything up like a normal person, I pick up the nearest project idea that’s cluttering up the floor and work on it til it’s done. Sure, it only makes the room a little less messy, but at the end I have a completed project and slightly more space!

One of the projects I’m working on is a dance costume made from a tanned horse’s mane and tail that I got from a Washington taxidermist who collects deceased animals from local farms (among other sources). The tail’s going to be on a belt, as I normally do with my horse tails, and I’m adding a pair of decorated belt pouches; the leather’s all from a deerskin coat I got at the Goodwill Bins a while back. You can see one of the pouches as a work-in-progress in the picture above.

My last Bins trip also netted me the paints next to it. Shopping there is less like a regular excursion where you have a list of things you want, and more like a giant yard sale that happens every day and there’s more brought out every fifteen minutes and you really don’t know what you’re going to go home with. In recent trips I’ve hauled out a pillowcase full of pine cones, a vintage Black and White scotch bottle (empty, of course), an empty antique projector case, and a bag full of several dozen partially full tubes of acrylic paints. I wasn’t able to open up the tubes prior to purchase, so I knew it was a gamble, but it paid off–only one was all dried up, and the rest were primarily in the earthy colors I use a lot. Although acrylics are a better paint green-wise than oils, with fewer toxins and a water base, they’re still a guilty convenience purchase (I mean really, I could just be mixing my own paints from egg and pigments, right?) So I was more than happy to keep these out of the waste stream and keep myself from having to buy new paints for a while, too.

We All Fall DownHowever, just because they weren’t dried up didn’t mean all the paints were in prime condition. Most of them just needed to be stirred to get the pigment to mix back in with the solvent, but some responded better than others. I hate to waste anything, and so I’ve turned working with imperfect paints into an art all its own. If some of the pigment has solidified and the paint that’s left is thin, it makes a good wash or faux-watercolor. Too thick, but still brushable? Look, it’s a texturing medium! They need to be treated a little differently than when they were new, but they’re far from useless. Even the dried out clumps of pigment can be carved into interesting shapes for assemblage work, or made into flakes to glue in as colored details.

Some artists are really particular about their media; they can’t get the exact effect they want if the chemistry’s a little off, or the texture is wrong. I, on the other hand, love all the wrongness. There’s a certain joy I get as an artist out of using things that were discarded by others, whether it’s old hide scraps or bits of plastic or damaged household items. I love the challenge of making the imperfect beautiful, of watching it transform from refused into rejuvenated.

And I think, as a society, we might do better to fall in love with imperfection a little more. I know people who won’t shop at a thrift store because “That’s where the poor people go”. The classism of that statement is a whole other rant in and of itself, but I will point out now that this attitude ties right in with what I was talking about a few weeks back about saving only the best for ourselves. We waste so many resources, artistic and otherwise, because we turn out noses up at the imperfections, the challenges in making something work.

But that’s why I’m a Hyena Artist following the Way of the Scavenger. Their loss is my gain, and few things thrill me more than digging into the Bins and seeing what goodies I come up with to make stuff out of. And now I’m going to go back to painting with my old paints, on the secondhand leather pouch, because it’s going to be awesome when it’s done.

*By the way, the assemblage piece a few paragraphs up is made with one of those aforementioned pine cones, along with other reclaimed materials. You can find out more about it here.

Activism, Animals, Anthropocentrism, Environmentalism, Science, Totems

Will You Be a Hyena With Me?

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American culture (at least the portions I’m most familiar with) has this weird thing about power and hunting. If you’ve ever seen The Lion King, you’ll notice that (despite never actually hunting a prey animal in the movie), the lions are the noble hunting animals, while the hyenas are merely skulking scavengers. And indeed it’s often assumed that hyenas only take the food other have killed, while lions do all the hard work. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. While all hyenas scavenge, spotted hyenas are some of the most successful hunters in the animal kingdom, both as individuals and groups. And while lions can certainly bring down their own game, they’re not above chasing other predators, like cheetahs or leopards–or, indeed, hyenas–off their kills.

From http://bit.ly/1iyrhQf
From http://bit.ly/1iyrhQf
Yet in popular culture, Lion the Hunter and Hyena the Scavenger continue to be presented as a good guy/bad guy dichotomy. Why? Chalk it up in part to our culture’s obsession with rugged individualism and independence. Freeloaders aren’t welcome, and if you benefit from the efforts of another, there’s something wrong with you, or so they say. You’re supposed to do for yourself, and then success will be yours.

But just like the myth of the lone wolf, this whole hunter/scavenger split doesn’t really reflect nature as it is. The truth is that the majority of predatory animals won’t turn their noses up at a carcass someone else killed if it’s fresh enough for their tastes and abilities. After all, hunting is a dangerous activity that can lead to injury or even death for the hunter, and can be energy-wasting too if a kill isn’t made. It wouldn’t make sense for a meat-eater to turn their noses up at a free and easy meal, and it’s thought likely that humans started off as scavengers before we were more active hunters.

Nature isn’t fussy, and it doesn’t waste a thing. Even when a predator doesn’t eat its entire kill, many other beings will benefit from the leftovers, from insects and other smaller animals to bacteria to fungi and even plants. In fact, entire ecosystems may benefit from the kills of one species; for example, when grizzly bears in North America hunt salmon during spawning season, in a good year they may only eat the most nutritious parts; the remains are left in the forest, sometimes quite some distance from the river, where the younger, smaller bears brought their fish to be eaten without being bothered by their bigger counterparts. The nutrients from the rotting salmon then go into enriching the soil that the forest ecosystem depends on, and in years where the salmon run isn’t as healthy, you can see the effects on the various other beings in the forest because fewer nutrients are being added to the system.

Does this mean that the rats and the trees and the fungi and burying beetles and other living beings that benefit from the bears’ leftovers are lesser beings simply because they scavenge what they didn’t kill? Of course not. Every being in an ecosystem is important, and its absence would be detrimental to the whole. We often glorify bears because they’re charismatic megafauna, big and impressive and so forth, but the burying beetles are just as amazing a bunch of critters, and every bit as necessary, regardless of our biases about them.

American burying beetle. From http://bit.ly/1sHaqCW.
American burying beetle. From http://bit.ly/1sHaqCW.
And we could stand to learn a lot from the burying beetles and others. We spend too much time feeling entitled to the very best the world has to offer. I’ve seen too many people not pack up their leftovers at a restaurant, and leave another meal’s worth of food behind–too many times for it to only be out-of-towners without access to fridges. There are those who brag they’ve never bought any clothing secondhand and look down on those of us who have. Some folks refuse to buy anything but a new car, not for reliability but for status. And it all ties into the same wasteful, prideful attitude that makes us think that hunting is better and more noble than scavenging.

But there’s a reason nature doesn’t waste–it can’t afford to. It’s most efficient to recycle and reuse anything possible, and waste is too expensive for such a massive and intricate system. Nature doesn’t draw on resources without returning them, yet somehow we think we can do the same and somehow defy one of the basic realities of life: nothing lasts forever. So we scoff at scavengers, our own and others’, and think that the ideal is to be the best hunter of fresh, new resources possible, whether that’s new clothing at the mall or a new site to frack for oil.

It’s only been in the past century or so that the U.S. has become such a resource-hogging behemoth. It’s been even less time since our culture shifted, in times of crisis, from responding by tightening the belt to responding by pretending nothing’s wrong. People in my grandparents’ generation went through the Great Depression and the rationing of World War II, when the government said “You can sacrifice a bit for your country!” Today, when we face some of the greatest environmental challenges our species has ever encountered, we’re told to keep spending, keep buying oil, and turn a blind eye to the evidence that says anything’s wrong. We’re spoiled; we don’t want to give anything up.

And we don’t want to be scavengers. We don’t want to dirty our hands with the leftovers. Yet any predator that turns up the chance at leftovers is less likely to succeed in the long run. How have we forgotten that in our pride?

I say it’s time we get back to our roots. We got as far as we have as a species through great resourcefulness and adaptability. But we’re throwing away a big part of that, the ability to get the most use out of resources before they’re completely used up. Let’s be creative scavengers and hunters and foragers again. Let’s make “reuse, reduce, recycle” not the niche domain of dedicated environmentalists, but something that belongs to everyone again. Let’s reduce new mining and logging efforts, and see what we can do with the resources we’ve already taken that are just waiting to be made into something new. Let’s make the creativity and resourcefulness of scavenging a point of pride, not just of hides and bones and scraps of meat, but steel and paper pulp and silicon.

Because we are human apes, and we’re in good company with hyenas and lions, vultures and eagles, wolves and foxes and coyotes, all of whom will hunt and scavenge as the opportunities and needs arise. These are all noble, resourceful beings; let’s remember that we are, too.

Will you be a hyena with me?

From http://bit.ly/1jwDeck.
From http://bit.ly/1jwDeck.
Artwork, Environmentalism

New vs. Secondhand Materials in My Art

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If you’ve visited my Etsy shop lately, you may have noticed that I’ve made some changes to how I describe the materials used in my works. In my continuing efforts to be more eco-friendly in my art, and to help prospective buyers make decisions that fit their personal ethics, I’ve divided the materials up into two categories:

New or reclaimed from industry materials: “New” describes supplies that I’ve either bought new from a shop or a commercial supplier, like certain jewelry findings, most acrylic paints, and artificial sinew and other thread. “Reclaimed from industry” is sort of the “pre-consumer waste” alternative–it includes scraps from commercial industries that I then reclaim myself or through a third party supplier. These are usually byproducts that the original industry can’t use, but which are kept out of the waste stream (read: the trash) through art and other means. A good example would be the tails and other scrap fur that are left over from garment manufacture.

Secondhand/recycled materials: Secondhand refers to materials that previously belonged to another private individual; this can range from hides and bones that were a part of a person’s private collection, to leather jackets, costume jewelry and other items from thrift stores, yard sales and the like. Recycled materials are things that I’ve otherwise repurposed; for example, handmade paper made from envelopes, unwanted junk mail, and other paper that I would have tossed into the recycling bin otherwise.

As both a mixed-media artist and an avid environmentalist, I feel very strongly that it’s my job to promote eco-friendly practices and materials. Over the years I’ve incorporated more and more green habits into both my art and my everyday life, and I want to encourage others to consider doing the same. By being more transparent and straightforward about where my supplies come from, I hope to inspire people to think more about where the items they’re buying come from, not just art, but in general. Look at the plastic and cardboard packaging that much of our food is wrapped in. You may see a label that says “Made with 75% post-consumer waste” on it, but have you ever really thought about what that means? For me, at least, it’s incentive to keep supporting companies that make use of recycled fibers and other materials, to be extra-careful about sorting out my recyclables, and to reduce my consumption in the first place.

And I want to do that with my art as well. My creations are intended to evoke honor and care for the environment, and by being more clear about the origin of my materials, I am not only offering up the information to others, but I’m also reminding myself of where the things I make things out of come from. As I spent the past couple of weeks updating each of over 300 listings in my shop, I became a lot more aware of the realistic proportions of new to secondhand materials I was working with. Sometimes I was surprised at how little secondhand stuff was in one piece; other times I’d find a piece that was entirely made of reclaimed materials. It’s not that I wasn’t conscious of my materials on some level before, but this exercise brought it into greater awareness. And it’ll keep happening each time I list new items and go through the process of describing the materials in detail.

Of course, just as the 75% post-consumer waste cardboard cracker box doesn’t tell you the whole story–the pollutants that are a result of even the most efficient recycling process, the energy used to make the box and fill it with stuff and truck it to the store–my brief descriptions aren’t the whole story, either. For example, I’m well aware that commercial tanning is a messy process with nasty byproducts, and that although acrylic paint is a much more eco-friendly product than oil paint, it’s not without toxins in its process, either (plus you can’t really clean the bottle well enough to recycle it). That’s part of why I’ve always maintained an open-door policy when it comes to questions about my materials and their sources. I’m happy to explain to the best of my knowledge where something comes from and what its impact is.

I still have a list of changes I want to make to my materials and my processes that are more in line with my environmental ethics. Some of them are out of reach right now because I don’t have the money or space, or because I haven’t had the time to experiment with greener alternatives (or I haven’t found one that fits my needs). But, like anyone, I do the best I can with what I have. I may still be renting from a fairly strict property management company and therefore can’t install solar panels, but my local electric company offers a 100% green energy plan with additional salmon habitat restoration, and I switched over to it a few years ago.

And I’ll keep knocking things off my “green list” as I go along. This shift in my materials descriptions is a small thing, but I hope it helps. Here’s an example of where you can find the materials information on each listing:

example

Please note that I did not include this on items in my Supplies/Vintage category, since for the most part those aren’t items I made myself. I also didn’t include it on the books I’ve written, since I didn’t make the physical books themselves, and it’s not on the custom work available because each custom piece may include a unique proportion of new to secondhand materials. That being said, you can find the new materials information on the majority of the items in my shop, and again you’re always welcome to ask me about sourcing.