It was exactly three weeks ago Friday when I broke my right ankle heading down the flight of stairs from my studio loft. I hadn’t been back until…this past Friday! My dear friend Susan Shantz (a talented artist herself, who is currently on sabbatical from her teaching position at the U of S) picked me up at home and off we went to my studio! As we entered, there were a few reminders of my last day there; in the entrance, a water-filled zip-lock bag lay on a chair which had been used to ice my ankle and not too far away was the boot that I won’t be needing for a while. All things considered, I was feeling pretty excited about the prospect of sharing a play date with Susan, as we would both be exploring materials that might otherwise be tossed out. I was particularly intrigued by Susan’s source of inspiration, a spherical mound of shredded paper (depicted in the photograph on the right). Sometimes the source of inspiration can come from the most ordinary things.
While Susan continued to transform her shredded paper with other materials and processes, I continued to work with the kitchen refuse that I wrote about in my first post (depicted in the photograph below).
This process of crocheting the netted vegetable bags and strips of plastic refuse, will be extremely time consuming, since I will be working with copious amounts of these materials to address the harm that these materials have on our environment.