Glass Experiment

Two days ago I found a glass cider jar in the the trash. Could I turn it into a massive bell jar?
Could I clip the neck off and make it short enough to fit in the kiln? Wherever there is a hard corner on a glass jar, there is a very high chance that the glass will crack in a direction you don't want. But I clipped it none the less!:



Then I cleaned it and put it in the kiln over top of two molds instead of just one. The next morning:

See those hairlines in the glass? Those are cracks. The back was worse. I guess the glass was so thick that it needed extra time to cool down so that different parts of the glass weren't contracting at different speeds. So it was an experiment for the recycling pile. Easy come, easy go. Today I loaded up the kiln with tried and true salsa and jam jars.

The Problem with Five Dollars

There are three possible outcomes to the performative, exchange aspect ofSaltwinning, two of which are uninteresting and one of which is fascinating and at the core of the project. The first is that I can take some of the best pieces back with me to New York and sell them for three or four digits. But all New York's art market can tell me is that trash art is trendy, which I already knew.

The second is that people can leave me five dollars, garbage, or that macrame plant holder that has been sitting in the house for months but hasn't been brought down to the Sally Ann yet-- junk, in other words. Expendable, undesirable stuff. And while this might be personally insulting (valuing my work at less than minimum wage), it actually means something more important: If garbage is defined as unwanted detritus, disgusting residue, worthless junk, expendable disposables, ugly crap, then by definition, this object they desire cannot be garbage. And even though someone wants a piece, wants to touch it, to look at it, has had fun with it-- desires it, in short-- the category of "garbage" is stronger than their personal experience.

The third possibility, and the reason I do all of these trash-based art economies, is that they could recognize that these objects are exquisite. They are beautiful, desirable, intimate, mysterious, delicious. And therefore not garbage. They are some other thing with some other value. In which case the dilemma is to figure out what kind of thing with what kind of value? This is what I am interested in. In a way, the artists in the crowd have it easy. They can leave an in-kind donation: their artistic pick of the litter for my pick of the litter. Other folks have to be more creative.

And this creativity, this moment of being stumped but open to possibilities is the basis of the project. Saltwinning is a microcosm of the cultural work that has to be done for a sustainable future. If garbage is always garbage, always worth five bucks or a piece of junk, even in the face of experiences that might dictate otherwise, then there is no other future, no other possibilities for garbage. Sustainability has to be a paradigm shift: the same old objects have to mean something new, circulate differently, get used differently, have a new ontology (being) with a new epistemology (knowledge). This is what is important and interesting about what can potentially come out of the exhibition. I look forward to how the City of Nelson responds to the challenge.

More finished pieces...III

I have 65. I want 100 by Friday.

Plastic Holiday Trash

Last week, the dumpsters were full of Christmas wreaths. And tinsel. And plastic trees. And ho-ho dishes. If you don't want to be wasteful, stay away from seasonal kitsch!

But the wreaths are practically ready to be thrown into the salt after I dismantle them in a destructively aesthetic manner:

Taking and Leaving

One of the most interesting-- and potentially frustrating-- parts of this exhibition is its exhibition "economy." People can take any piece at any time provided that they leave something behind of equal or greater value. Starting in 2006, I've been letting people take the art from my trash-based exhibitions, and their willingness, creativity, and generosity has lead to this current economy.

I've been having conversations with various people in the community about what might happen. Yesterday a man told me I ought to expect that if people left money, it would be five dollar bills and change. That surprised me. This is a community full of artisans-- at the Craft Connection, the local artisan craft store a few blocks away, a mug sells for at least $30. People know how much time, effort, and technical expertise goes into hand making a unique object-- surely more than $5. Perhaps I can only expect five dollars or change from him.

Another woman I spoke to, a fine artist (as opposed to a craft artisan) and a curator, wanted to know if things she left behind could then be taken by other people. There is no rule against that, so it is certainly possible. In theory and according to the rule of "equal to or greater than," if things are traded out more than once, the overall value can only increase or stay the same. But she and I both knew that if people consistently go after the best pieces and do not have "best pieces" to leave in exchange, the opposite might happen. Many years ago when I was a pre-teen, I was involved in a version of "equal to or greater than" with a youth group in Lac la Biche. We went door to door, starting with a dollar, and asked people to trade for something of equal or greater value. I remember one house in particular. We had something fantastic-- I don't remember what it was, but I remember what we got for it. The woman wanted the fantastic object so badly that she gave us the closest thing she had on hand: a brown macrame plant holder. We had a hard time trading that away.

On the other hand, in other exhibitions (like the Dawson City Trash Project), a moral economy developed where gallery visitors schooled each other and kept tabs on what appropriate taking behaviour ought to be. Only take one thing. Leave the best things for others to see. But that was also an economy where you could take anything you wanted at any time, period. At the time, I wasn't sure if people would take former garbage (they did. In spades). Here, since there is a market-like equivalency being determined, people might just do as they please, since they are technically paying for things.

We shall see. The opening is going to be a mad house. There were 41 people at the artist talk, and all of them seem to be coming to the opening to take/exchange art. At the end of the night, we'll see what remains behind.

Garbage Girl

On my way to the artist talk last night, I did a quick styrofoam run to a couple of electronic stores. Once I had my styro, a customer recognized me: "You're that garbage.... artist." Thanks to the generous articles in the Nelson Star and the Daily News, people know what I'm up to.

More finished pieces...II

The business of salt-winning

Salt-winning: the deliberate production of salt from seawater.

Everything in the exhibition will involve salt. I mainly use salt scraped off of New York City's streets and sidewalks. They over-salt there for liability reasons. Some salt has a pinkish hue, other salt is grey, greenish or blueish. But it all dissolves the same and comes up bright white when I salt-win. I used to run the dirty salt water through a funnel and a coffee filter until I realized that when salt water wicks up an object, it leaves its dirt behind.

You can salt-win by evaporating salty water. Easy. But there is also an art to it. To make salt gardens, which is sort of what I am doing, you can add ammonia (to make the water evaporate faster) and liquid bluing (to break down some of the chemicals in basic salts so they colour a bit-- liquid bluing is old-fashioned "bleach" btw). If you are interested in the recipe, or want to know exactly how much faster salt water evaporates when a fan is used, Wayne Schmidt is an expert, A-type personality that grows beautiful crystals of all kinds.

I make a little evaporating pool for each object I'm letting the salt wick onto. Sometimes similar projects share one plate:




The problem with this set-up is that I am constantly fussing with the little pools, moving them closer or farther to the oscillating heater, switching them out as some finish and others take their place. When you move the pools, the crystals get disturbed and they don't turn out perfectly square. Also, how close or how far from the heat (how fast the water evaporates) affects the crystals.

A perfect, undisturbed crystal will look like the cubes in this blog's header. But I can tell that whomever made them took them out of the water instead of letting the water totally evaporate-- see the tiny white ball-like bits on them? Those are another type of crystal that only grow via wicking or drying out. So the cube crystals still had a wee bit of saltwater in them after the cube formed.

There is one more type of crystal that happens when the water evaporates very quickly and the salt concentration is very high:


See at the bottom how the salt sort of fans out with long shards and a sort of flat plate between them? That's from the salt accumulating at the top of the water and forming a crust. Then the rest of the salty water sits underneath that crust with a space for air. The container needs to be smallish because these will only form when there is an edge to attach to.

A little-known salt fact: when you mix salt and elmer's glue, you have two or three seconds before the salt sucks out all the water and you're left with glue-rubber. I reckon that if you're ever trapped in a bomb-shelter with only glue and salt, you should mix them together to get pure-ish water. The final water-less rubber looks like this:

This image also has a bit of whitener in it, since the salt stays dirty.

One last thing: salt wicks up. If I put a piece of foam, charcoal brick, chunk of felt, or other solid but permeable object in the salt water, the salt will always start forming on the top, then move to the sides, but will never form on the bottom or middle if the object is thick enough. So if you are afraid of a slow-moving salt attack, hide under your mattress.

More finished pieces...

Out of the Gates...

The first finished pieces-- a mixed bag:

Awesomest Garbage

Many thanks to SHARE's dumpster and the Hat Factory's clear blue bag for these fabulous finds:

Private and Proprietary Garbage

One of the biggest problems I've encountered in Nelson that hasn't come up in the other places I scavenge for art materials is that the trash is not very accessible, and if it is (on the curb during garbage day), people are rather anti-scavenge. Far more than two thirds of the commercial dumpsters in town are locked. The jeweler even has an ornate silver lock on his trash bin. For such an artsy, semi-rural area, there is no garbage scavenging culture. And because people pay for their garbage by the bag and those bags sit directly in front of their single-dwelling houses, the connection between an individual and his or her garbage remains identifiable in a way that doesn't happen in New York City or the Yukon. At least that's how I've theorized the discomfort and even hostility I've encountered when I've asked to look at people's trash, even when I flash my artist-not-homeless credentials.

A point in case: I've been getting my best garbage from SHARE, a second hand store that advocates ecological sustainability. They unlock their dumpster for me, and I root through all of the discarded donations. This picture is what I got yesterday morning; there were many, many plastic Christmas wreaths. If you don't want to be wasteful, don't buy non-biodegradable seasonal decorations!
But when I went to another second hand store (which shall remain unnamed-- Nelson has at least five), even though the woman kept telling me how they tried to keep everything out of the waste stream, and how they were patrons of the arts, I could not go through their dumpster. When I pushed a bit, she said it was because the dumpster hadn't had enough for a full load, so her husband brought a truck full of their household garbage-- so there were kitchen scraps. I told her that kitchen scraps didn't bother me, and they would be in bags, which I rarely open, but she still didn;t budge. Then, realizing that she had told me that she had done something mildly illegal-- getting her institution to pay for her domestic garbage, which is a real problem in Nelson and the reason there are locks on all the dumpsters-- she became sickly sweet and let me go through the office trash, but not before she pointed out which bags of office trash I couldn't open. Then she waved a broom at me and said "you've been a bad wascilly wabbit," Elmer Fudd style, and left me alone.

Other up-scale stores, such as the jewelers and the fancy kitchenware store, claim they have no garbage of interest and will not unlock their dumpsters for me to verify this.

The stores are pretty much my best bet for garbage; I don't want to cause the obvious discomfort that curb-side recycling engenders, and getting trash before it actually hits the waste stream always results in higher quality trash in better quantities. But except for SHARE, the Hat Factory, and Pheonix Computers, it has been an uphill battle. Nelson is a garbage desert, even though it has plenty of trash.