Backbone > Life in the Balance
Make Art, Not Landfill
By Susan Piperato; photo by Chris Lopez

Reduce, reuse, recycle, for the good of the earth— and then, for the good of the soul and the sheer joy of the process, recreate. With the addition of that fourth R, the mantra of the ecology-minded has taken on aesthetic and spiritual meaning. But resurrecting junk and waste into beautiful, meaningful and sometimes useful objects d’art is hardly new; in fact, it hasn’t been a radical act since early in the 20th century. The Surrealists did it. The Dadaists did it. The Pop Artists did it. Those with kitsch and campy sensibilities still do it. And now a growing number of self-taught “outsider artists” and “dumpster divers”—those self-proclaimed rebels against American consumer culture—do it, along with a growing number of professional “found object” artists who, for sustainable as well as aesthetic reasons, prefer to use the stuff other people throw away as their material of choice.

Take Esopus artist Judith Hoyt. A printmaker by training—having graduated in 1980 from suny New Paltz with a bfa—she felt herself being drawn inexplicably to using old scrap metal and crushed cans that she now jokingly calls “metal road kill.” By 1986, having married, started a family, and begun building a solar-powered, energy-efficient home, Hoyt was taking walks and “schlepping metal” home from two old dumps and a couple of embankments down the road from her house.

“I had a job, and the kids,” she says, “but I always made art—at least little bits and pieces of art. And I liked looking for metal while I took walks. I’m always looking down. It’s an adventure, finding each piece, and there’s a story on the piece, on what’s left of the writing or color, or in finding it. Sometimes it’s really treacherous. The metal’s always thrown off a bank on the side of a road, so I have to get down there to throw it onto the bank and then climb back up.”

Back in the ‘80s Hoyt enrolled in a basic metal class at the Women’s Studio Workshop, where she now serves on the board of directors. Soon afterward she held one of her first solo shows there. “I worked on a metal collage,” she recalls, “and I liked working with metal. What I do now is actually sort of like printmaking, because you have to make a plate, scratch into its whole surface, and rub paint or wax on it. It’s just that there’s no paper.”

Today Hoyt works exclusively with crushed cans—many still bearing name brands and slogans, and rusted, with paint fading—and pieces of scrap metal that she’ll run out into intersections to get, or which anonymous admirers leave on her porch. She cuts the cans into the shapes of various body parts—face, eyes, nose, lips, arms, torso, legs, feet, ears—and places them on large, worn pieces of wood or tiny squares of copper sheets, collaging them with old maps and text taken from antique books, and painting them with oil or encaustic paint to create collages and large two-dimensional, silhouetted or mask-like portraits of imagined characters as well as “wearable art” pins.

On the afternoon that I visited Hoyt’s studio, located in the attic of her home, I couldn’t help but notice how closely aligned her domestic and professional lives are. In the center of her attic room stands the chimney, which she has decoupaged using cement, various discarded kitchen utensils, and her children’s old toys—marbles, Matchbox cars, plastic figures, a Ken Griffey, Jr. baseball card. On her worktable were strips of bright yellow coffee can and pieces of an old red plaid Scotch cooler. “I like to work figuratively,” she said. “I let the shapes and colors determine what they’ll be.”

Hoyt’s works are whimsical, delig htful, dark, or humorous—sometimes all at once. The walls of her studio are peopled with them. One figure has old bent forks for hands; another’s head is black and cat-shaped, with eerie golden eyes cut from another can. There are figures made of old stovepipe, flattened spray cans, a Crisco oil can, a “No Trespassing” sign, a Mystery Oil can, and “some parts that fell off a car,” according to Hoyt. When I remark that found-object artists seem to have a sense of humor, she shows me a menorah made from a Kikkoman soy sauce can by Philadelphia dumpster diver and fellow found-metal artist Neil Benson.

“I consciously use material that has a wonderful history,” Hoyt says. “Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating, it’s so beautiful to begin with. I love found metal.” She is careful to point out that she is not unique in making recycling part of her art and that she does so for a wide range of reasons. “I just made my way into this world because I love the material,” she says. “But in general, my life is about all those things. My husband is a carpenter, and at suny he lived at the Environmental Studies Center. We have passive solar panels, and we also heat with wood. I compost and recycle. It’s all part of my life, the art and the environment, as much as I can make it.”

Whether you’re a professional or amateur artist, exploring the worlds of outsider and found-object art, along with dumpster diving, is certain to enhance your creativity as well as your daily practice of sustainability.

• The Hudson Valley Materials Exchange at Stewart Airport (www.hvmaterials exchange.com offers used and new art supplies and building, decorating, and gift-making materials at nominal fees. The hvme features an online gallery showcase and price list of available materials, as well as a twice-monthly “Reusables into Art” workshop series, led by artist Shawn Dell Joyce on Saturdays from 2 to 4pm. Admission to your first workshop is free; thereafter a $3 materials fee applies. Space is limited to15 participants; pre-register by e-mailing hvme@hvc.rr.com or calling 567-1445.

The 2003 workshop schedule follows:

3/01 – Mixed Media Assemblages

3/15 – Sculpture from Scrap

4/05 – Collage & Decoupage

4/19 – Making Flower Presses
(at The Museum of the Hudson
Highlands; www.museum
hudsonhighlands.org)

5/03 – Creative Gifts from Garbage!

5/17 – Painting on Glass

6/07 – Stamps from Wood Scraps

6/21 – Sign Painting on Reuseables

7/05 – Home Decor with Reusables

7/19 – Temporary Murals

8/02 – Creative Cabinet Painting

8/16 – Make Your Own School Supplies

9/06 – Presentation Materials from Artists
from Reused Binders

9/20 – Primitive Printmaking

10/04 – Jewelry from Junk

10/18 – Faux Finish with Wall Paint

11/02 – Cards from Discards

11/15 – Toys from Reusables

12/06 – Gifts from Garbage II

• The bible of dumpster diving, The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving, written by dive guru John Hoffman and originally published to cult acclaim in 1994, disappeared from print until its paperback reissue
in 1999 by Breakout Publications ($14.95).

• With more than 80 featured artists, Found Object Art (Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 2002)—by Dorothy Spencer, home designer and founder of Reconstructions, a recycled materials home furnishings company, considered the most authoritative com- pendium of artists who work with recycled materials. It includes five pieces by
Judith Hoyt. For more information, visit www.schifferbooks.com.

• Judith Hoyt’s work will be featured in “Montage: Two and Three Dimensional Works” at the Catskill Mountain Foundation Bookstore, 7970 Main Street, Hunter, beginning March 1. For information, call (518) 263-4908 x211. (Also featured will be artists Robert Ohnigian of Wood-
stock; Jeanne Straussman of Greenville; Judy Pfaff of Kingston; and Robert Leaver of West Shokan.) Last month, Hoyt was also featured in the Winter Show of crafts in Baltimore; she has also been selected as one of 120 artists and artisans out of 1,200 applicants for the 2003 Smithsonian Craft Show, set to open on April 23 in Washington, dc. For more information, go to www.smithsoniancraftshow.org or call (202) 357-4000.