Predisposition to Obligatory Creation

Formline designing was a crucial part of my artistic path since it began, for this reason I figured it would be suitable to make formline art from waste I had collected to create art from. To collaborate First Nations art, or art in general, with Garbage and wasteful items is, I find, a counteraction to the problems these non-degradable products have with the earth. Therefore, if me doing this project will create insult to anyone in the Aboriginal community I apologize, but I see it as an affine concept to juxtapose NWC art with garbage. I feel having blood ties to the Tlingit nation and being an artist of that culture as well, positions me to submit time to create the intrinsic art of formline with the waste materials left behind from primarily my own personal consumerism.

Making art from items generally unconsidered to be aesthetically pleasing has been an interesting effort. I have created a formline Orca whale from mainly plastic bags, Styrofoam, aluminum tape, and masking tape, but also included is cardboard from various food packages and other consumed items. My inspiration came from artists from the mid 20^th century such as Robert Rauschenberg and Arman, who would use various items and other commonplace objects to add into their paintings and sculptures.

In the beginning the absolute clarity for what I was to create from the garbage I had collected was not there. I was confused and wasn’t sure what type of art I would create, a sculpture, a painting, furniture of some sort, I didn’t know. Until I came across a drawing of an orca my teacher Wayne Price drew in one of my sketchbooks: and there was my project. I would create a formline orca from the, would be, waste I collected. This orca I would assume at first to be just like the drawing but it morphed into its own presentation as I went along.

The first part of my Keet – orca in the Tlingit language – would be out of plastic bags. I rolled, twisted, then taped tightly the bags and functioned them as the form to create the back of the Keet. From there I again twisted some more of the bags and some cardboard – for the sharp curve of the stomach area close to where the head would be situated. The plastic bags I came to realize then would be the most malleable material I could use for the rounded effect I wished to seek for the design. As envisioned they would become just that and the main productive element to my creation.

Plastic bags can hold place in the use of moving objects or stuffing cups and glasses or storing paper, to say just some of they’re useful potentials. They can be used repetitiously, but this depends on how long before they tear and for instance the duration to which the person owning them wants to keep the bags. But the main use for them I reside with is to carry the consumable items from their place of purchase to home, to then be put under the sink until the bathroom garbage or cat litter needs to be bagged and tossed out into the alleyway dumpster. And eventually the bags would then accumulate to the point of overwhelming the space underneath the sink. I always wondered what I would end up doing with all the plastic bags I collected and this project was a suitable solution for the predicament.

As I continued on with shaping the project it was then made evident I needed a more solid base for a lot of the forms I was to create such as the ovoids and U-shapes; and everything else besides the primary form of the body for that matter. I had just purchased an apartment size deep freeze and had the protectively coherent Styrofoam from the inside of the box. This I presumed would be the perfect material to use as the solid base for the forms explained earlier. Styrofoam did equate to my expectations as the material to use for the base of the forms. It was indeed a beneficial addition to the structuration of the design I was assembling into physicality.

Tape was beneficial just the same as the plastic bags and Styrofoam; although I did not know the extent to which it would be of importance for the project. Not only did I use it to tighten and solidify the plastic bags it became the outer skin, for lack of a better word, for the Killer whale. The taping was an interesting feat to accomplish. As I continued wrapping the forms, after constructing them in the manner I wished to achieve, I came to the end of a few rolls of tape. When the end of the tape roll was met I would then continue to the next until I did not have anymore. I went to Canadian Tire looking for a specific electrical tape I had run out of while trying to match all the secondary formline components of the Keet. And as I became disappointed in not being able to find the electrical tape I was looking for. Then I seen some aluminum tape and figured it may be a good choice to use. It was a satisfactory decision to choose the aluminum tape because when I wrapped some of the forms with it, the tape wrinkled when pressed and looked as if it was just tinfoil I used to wrap the shapes, feeding the effect of a reused waste material.

I was fixated on the idea of painting this project when it was finished. I thought to create a shell with cut and refigured Tim Horton’s cups around the orca to make it aesthetically manageable to paint. As I continued to tape and construct the forms together I decided that instead of painting it, using just the white masking tape as the skin of the project looks good and that it could equate to the orca being an albino or a spirit.

The final addition to my project was the black plastic sheets I discovered in the studio I share with my cousin. I was trying to figure what I should use to strengthen and hold the pieces of the project together. The plastic sheets proved to be the answer to my problem and they were easily reformed to the shapes of the projects body. My project of trash-art was now in completion.

From here I would like to speak on the polemical viewpoint of my project. “The demands of capitalist production… do not exhaust the contradictions of consumer culture” (Goodman 35). When bringing that previous statement into alignment with the ramifications – such as garbage from consumed products – the end result inevitably works out as the products ending up as garbage dump accumulations. Humankind has begun the practices for recycling, reducing, and reusing, yet the disposing of many of these items to landfills that fit these categories still exists, case in point from the inexhaustible consumerism. I can’t say I don’t and will not throw garbage like this away ever again in my life but I am now open and aware to the possible artistic endeavors with trash. The materials are there in our everyday lives to use for this practice of trash art, only the drive to do so is the spark needed for its progression.  

Part of my motivation of alignment with the trash and NWC art is form the section from the book Art in the Life of the Northwest Coast Indian, “The art was thus intimately bound up with the social structure, a fact which accounts for its great strength but also for its rapid decline in the 20^th century; for when the art became disorganized through the impact of acculturation to white customs, the art lost all its motivation… Thus Northwest Coast Indian art must be regarded as a thing of the past…” (Gunther 2). This section of the book has played a role in strengthening my interest for Northwest Coast art. It was published in 1966 when the potlatch ban and residential schools were still in full swing. The assumptions placed by the author that NWC art should be regarded as a thing of the past, I can only laugh and say no it is not; I have now made NWC art from items once predestined to be waste.

Ideas such as, the Maker Movement, where it “… encourages, collaboration, invention, and radical participation with a single goal: to create new things,” is where trash-art should be included within the same context (Samtani 1).  The idea may sound unattractive, making art from garbage, but not all garbage is hindered by say, rot, and can still be an active ingredient to the creation of a spectacular work of art. Don’t get me wrong, the practice of trash-art is active amongst many other artists, but let’s say for instance, like the maker movement, trash-art is proposed to elementary schools. Who better than the up and coming leaders of this world should the idea of trash-art be proposed to? They are the future and not all but some will journey the artistic path and become prospects in the arrival of a new age of creation, and should be introduced to include trash into an artistic endeavor.

Our current existence has become intertwined with prodigious technological advancements yet we deceive ourselves with the out of sight, out of mind axiom when throwing away our garbage. ; is there technology aimed specifically for waste management? If not then why don’t we make more art from this everlasting waste? With this project I have learned more capabilities of art production and I hope to always stay keen with the idea of trash-art. With such vast productions of materials such as food wrappers and containers, the value of these items can go from zero to ten with the collaboration of them romanticized into prospective art. We as humans have opened a door to a storm of harmful pollutants with our industrial productions, and we still haven’t figured how to shut that door. With the making of art from garbage maybe that door can be nudged a bit more shut than it has been with the recycling, reduce, reuse implementation.