Art of refuse
Published Saturday June 27th, 2009
Discarded CDs, batteries, cellphones, egg cartons and hub caps find new life in eco-art group exhibition 'Green Minds Think Alike' at Gallery Opaque.
A simple household mishap set Sheila McFee's art practice on a new path.
"It started when my patio table blew over last summer," the Fredericton artist and gallery owner says recently. When the table tipped, its tempered glass top "broke into a million pieces, and I just couldn't throw it out."
McPhee was working on a painting in shades of green at the time, and experimented with applying the glass shards to the canvas.
She loved the effect the appliquéed fragments lent to the work, and has been making "eco-art" with trash and found objects ever since. She uses egg cartons, hearing aid batteries, computer parts, golf tees, hub caps, "anything I can keep out of the landfill," she says.
About 20 of her works are on display at Gallery Opaque, the commercial gallery she opened with her son, the photographer Joshua Slade, in 2006, as part of a group eco-art show that opened June 18.
She is joined by other artists whose work has a green theme. Victoria Victoria is a Saint John native who began making papier-mâché sculptures and reliefs from her trash, including cardboard and egg cartons, during a garbage strike in Toronto.
"I learned the hard way the need to reduce household waste by composting, re-using and recycling," she writes in her artist statement.
Printmaker Joan Crate uses found wood for her woodcuts and recycles other materials such as linoleum in other types of printmaking. Joann O'Brien buys old windows and mirrors at yard sales and paints on the glass. Billy Yvonne affixes used CDs and parts of cellphones to his canvases.
The opening was co-sponsored by Green Shops, an initiative by the City of Fredericton that encourages businesses to adopt environmentally friendly practices. In the gallery, McFee has switched to a low-flow faucet and compact fluorescent light bulbs, and she uses a push mower to trim its small patch of grass.
The gallery is carving out something of a niche for ecologically minded art.
"We seem to be moving in that direction," McPhee says, "and that is something we'd like to be known as."
McPhee has made two series of eco-art work. In Tim Hortons Recycled, she used discarded coffee cups, lids, trays, filters, bottle caps, stir sticks and coffee cans, as well as blending used coffee grinds with her paint for colour and texture. In Olympic Dreams, she recycled packaging from the products of Olympic sponsors such as Coca-Cola cans and McDonald's paper french-fry containers.
The environmental leanings of her work permeate her lifestyle.
"I call myself a 'pedal-pusher,' " she says. "I don't have a car. I walk and bike everywhere. And when I walk, I find wonderful things."
This includes the expected - pop cans, fast-food refuse, bottle caps - as well as unusual discards such as an old-fashioned set of hot/cold taps, many single earrings and an old pair of eyeglass frames. She also collects the shards of taillights left behind after fender-benders, using the red and amber fragments in her work.
Call it "accidental art."
Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal and is a frequent contributor to Salon.
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