Eight Resourceful Artists on Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling

Tom Friedman

I collect a lot of stuff everywhere. My wife accuses me of being a hoarder, but I always say, “There’s going to be someplace that this can go.…” When we go to the dump every Sunday, there’s a “take it or leave it” recycling place. I scavenge in that and always find new things. There are a lot of kids toys and other things to take. I’ve got boxes and boxes labeled “things” and then “miscellaneous things.” I’ve been collecting things for 30 years, like old phone cords … casting old spiral phone cords can be kind of difficult. I still have my old Walkman CD player. I just don’t throw things away. I think about objects having a history—and representing a sort of culmination of a history that, if you want to be absurd about it, could be charted back to the Big Bang. They have a sort of cultural meaning that can be very specific and very diverse, which is a point of departure I like.

For Kid, I used a lot of found objects to create the surface. I made a model and ultimately the piece was cast in stainless steel. On the arm is a plastic conduit used for drainage, a muffin tin, a Nerf football, donut shapes that kids put on cones, a sippy cup, oven roaster tins, some dolls—a wide variety of things. There’s an ecological element to it, but an individual can only can do so much. There are also elements of fantasy and cataloging in it, which I like. Creating an avalanche of associations when you put a bunch of things together is interesting to me.

Albano Hernandez

These works were made with a process I started three years ago, at the end of my first term at the Royal College of Art. I’d been working on other kinds of paintings with the material remainders of images in my workshop, but I wanted to create paintings based on the idea of a brushstroke. I got the idea for how to do this in the supermarket when I saw some chorizo.

First, I take air dry clay, mix it with PVA [primer], and add color with acrylic. I’m taking waste from the workshop—from packages and whatever else comes to the studio—and putting it into the clay. That makes a material that I can then roll up and slice with a food-slicing machine. The materials appear in the slices of paint.

It’s a domestic slicer that I bought, and it really works. My studio is like a kitchen, with mixers, the slicer, and a shredding machine strong enough to shred plastics. Conceptually, it is important to me to create a circular economy that doesn’t generate waste in the studio. Now I’m also using other materials from my everyday life. The paintings in the end are like a diary, where I can find waste and materials that came from my everyday. I’m looking at it from an ecological point of view, and I like purity and impurity in the paintings. I’m trying to do serious work in a playful way.

Leslie Martinez

For me, recycling is about the potential to transform materials. It’s about working with what you have. I think that’s playful, gritty, and determined. It’s about resourcefulness, and responding to and embracing your circumstances.

When I think about making art, I think about this human desire to shape the world with your hands. I wanted to use the stuff of the world, so I gravitated toward materials like fabrics, and rags—things that are ever abundant. I incorporate them in my paintings, alongside my studio work clothes, canvas cutoffs— those pieces left over after you stretch a canvas—as well as hand towels that I use to soak up paint and water. I’m also using paint chips, which get made when acrylic paint is peeled off work surfaces and tarps. Sometimes, I’ll crush these up put them in a blender. Basically, I want anything that I use in the process of making my work to get absorbed back into the work.

None of the art-making materials that I bring into the studio get thrown away. It’s hard to achieve a truly zero-waste studio practice: there is waste from things I eat and so on. But I don’t even throw away the dust after sweeping the floor. Everything goes into bins, where bits are organized by size; something might ruminate for months or years. But everything that comes in for the purpose of making art eventually finds its time. That’s because I want to be conscious of my ecological impact, but also because I want to imbue things we discard with value, and make sure nothing gets left behind. Sometimes, I stuff the inside of the formwork with grocery bags, or with those thin plastic films that all your products come inside of. Then, I use color to defamiliarize the recycled materials.

Yu Ji

Foraged is a pumping machine made from secondhand materials. It was a specially commissioned work for my solo project at Chisenhale Gallery in London. They invited me to visit for a research-based residency, and Foraged became a machine that cooked weeds in hot water, like the wild plants that grow around the canal area in the east of London. The machine kept cooking during the whole exhibition and pumping water through plastic tubes that traced the gallery floor up to the wall and the ceiling. The water dripped very slowly down onto other work below.

When you entered the space, you could feel the heat of the water boiling inside. It was also a sort of sound installation because you could hear the sound of the pumping. I was thinking about how to make a sculpture that can be mobile and can go with you wherever you want. All the materials in Foraged are familiar in my work: materials associated with handicraft, secondhand objects, nature materials. I’m interested in finding possibilities for building a new recycling system, and in trying to build new connections between objects. Some are found, some are newly created, some are in between. What’s interesting to me is how to find a new way to let elements work together, to build a new kind of organic system, not only in this piece but in other works of mine. I’m really interested in normal materials that people use in the basic structure of their daily lives. It’s a part of our urbanization and modern life nowadays.

Hugo McCloud

I’ve always seen myself as a material-based artist. When I decided I wanted to go into fine art, I was doing industrial design—wood and metal fabrication—and I realized I didn’t know how to paint with a brush on canvas and things like that. So I wondered how I could use different materials and create my own language. I started with metal left over from the fabrication I was doing, and then I would also get materials from scrapyards. My first paintings were made of stuff like that.

I was playing with all these different materials, and then an interest in block printing took me to India. That’s where I first saw these woven plastic sacks. There was an abandoned house and, in front, there were all these sacks filled with construction materials or dirt—I don’t know what was in them. There were like 200 of them, all in these faded offset colors. When I stood back and blurred my eyes, the arrangement started looking like an abstract painting.

Soon enough, I started making paintings out of plastic bags. I was interested in these bags because they had been downcycled and then used by common people. And even though it’s plastic that seems very fragile— like it will rip or tear—there’s something very durable and long-lasting about it. Everybody knows that plastic stays around forever. It’s like the philosophy that anything, at any given time, can be found to be beautiful or useful or valuable.

Liz Larner

When I heard that China stopped accepting our recycling, I decided to keep mine. It built up rapidly, and I was overwhelmed! I started to realize the issue was one of mass and scale, and that these are very sculptural issues.

I wanted to deal with more than those few things you put in a blue bin each day before they get taken away. I was thinking about the Pacific plastic patch. So I started making forms that resemble seafoam drifts, which are amorphous and floating. They’re made of my recycling—things like bottles and containers, but also objects that carry an emotional attachment even as they’re just throwaways, like a pair of swimming goggles I got for my son that have hearts for eyes. It used to be important to take care of your things because you had less, and you valued it more. That turn to disposability devalued things so much.

I took a class at the Newkirk Center [in California], and learned that recycling is not going to work. We need to repurpose and reuse, which is a whole different mindset. Recycling still imagines disposability. You used to see a lot more funky assemblage art, but around the 2000s, I noticed that I myself certainly got caught up in the thrill of the new— in making things with all these new machines.

I have plenty more recycling leftover, and now, I’m experimenting with new ways to use it.

Clarissa Tossin

I’ve been weaving with strips of Amazon delivery boxes since around 2015. The first time I used them, I was making work about the presence of industry in the Amazon rainforest. The city of Manaus, which is the capital of Amazonia, is a huge industrial hub that produces electronics for a global market. You wouldn’t imagine that iPhones and Harley Davidsons get made in this lush habitat, in the most biodiverse forest in the world.

I started creating terra-cotta replicas of objects manufactured in the Amazon, and I showed them in containers that resemble traditional basketry made in the Amazon region. Different communities use fibers from whatever is readily available. But I live in a city, and all around me, there are Amazon boxes. So I wove with those.

Soon, I was collecting boxes from friends and colleagues, and from the trash room in my building. (I don’t have Amazon Prime. I refuse.) And I started making weavings that lie flat on the wall, for a series called “Future Geography.” I wove the boxes with images from NASA’s Webb telescope. The universe is being captured through these technological apparatuses, imaging space as the next frontier. That series is about how private space exploration is born of a colonial mentality.

For Future Fossil (2018), I melted my own plastic waste into a 22-foot cylinder. I wanted to emulate geological strata, a core sample of the future, all made from my personal trash. We don’t want to see our own waste, but I wanted to make trash something to look at. I thought that for the rest of my life, I might recycle all my plastic into artworks, but making that sculpture, I got too sick from the toxins.

Dachi Cole

I use found materials to create dolls that are life-size and also handheld. I’m often using cotton, leather, clothing, and a lot of string; I might use plastic or foam. I might rip and tear them apart to make texture. Sometimes the materials are donated, or I go to the thrift store. In New York, there’s this really great place called Materials for the Arts. It’s run by the city’s sanitation department, and you can go there and load up on rugs, couches, typewriters, whatever.

I’m a member of this artist collective called HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican?—YAMs for short—and we started making dolls together around 2014. In general, my process is pretty intuitive. I like that it’s ecological, but for me, first, it’s about working with what’s available, and about how what I’m seeing could become anything— whether it’s an old wooden box I turn into a chest plate, or a hat or a shoe that I cut up because I want to use its structure. My practice is always a dialogue with the materials. I never sketch things out first; if anything, I make to-do lists. I always want to find treasures in found objects.

I’m searching for ways to stay connected to playfulness as an adult, and thinking about how you find meaning in your daily life—about how to avoid getting bored.