by: Lauren Hodges

Garbage Art Guild
art reception
Wabi Sabi Warehouse,
19 N. 9th Street
Friday, December 18th; 6-7pm

As the holidays approach, trips to the grocery store never seem to stop; arriving relatives require extra toilet paper, the egg nog is running dry every night, and the tree can’t quite hold enough candy canes. What is one to do with all of those plastic bags? Dixon Stetler has thought of that.

“The girls and I have been using them to make wreaths,” she says.

The “girls” she speaks of are Willa Irvin-Bushman, Sophia Watkins and Clara Santabala: the three trash mavins that make up Stetler’s Garbage Art Guild (GAG). All semester the girls have been hard at work in their after-school meetings, transforming everyday items headed for the landfill into sustainable art. The three students seem destined to carry on Stetler’s artistic legacy, who is known around town for her bike tube mats, the Cameron Art Museum glove tree and those colorful garden hose baskets.

“My main objective was to teach them that art supplies don’t have to be expensive,” Stetler says. “They are all around us, waiting to be used.” One of her first lessons for the GAG was to take the girls to Family Dollar and get them face-to-face with a manager. “Their mission was to get cardboard boxes from him.”

Once they mentioned that the boxes would be used for art, the manager happily obliged. After cutting the boxes into strips, weaving class commenced, and their find for the day resulted in a collection of baskets. “I just thought that was a great way to start, getting the girls to ask permission for supplies. I think it really showed them how much is out there.”

More art supplies arrived in the form of doomed paperback books and old architectural drawings rescued from the trash. The blueprints were made into what the class called “the world’s largest paper airplanes.” As for the books, they were folded back in the shape of cones and covered with glitter to make mini Christmas trees. “We called them ‘conceptual trees,’” Stetler says. “It was just another lesson about looking in odd places for creative supplies.”

In each class, Stetler thought up a new way for her young squires to view the world and its material waste. “Not everything was about trash,” she says. “Some of our activities were learning about waste—meaning things we just don’t need.”

One such activity included a scrapbook of gathered advertisements from catalogs. Each day the girls would bring in clippings of items for sale that they felt humans just didn’t need to survive. “Sky Mall was probably the best and funniest source for that project,” she says. “It was so much fun to see what they would bring in each class.”

The images include gloves with slits for long fingernails and an indoor strip of astroturf for pet waste on especially unpleasant days. “Of course, there were some things they brought in that not everyone agreed were useless,” Stetler says about an advertisement for wrinkle cream. Laughing, she says, “They’re young. It’s all subjective, I guess.”

Until Stetler and her eco-sharp child protegés can come up with an idea for all of the discarded wrapping paper we’re about to use (tsk tsk, people), the public can enjoy their creations at the GAG’s first art reception. On Friday, December 18th, the girls and their garbage will have their time to shine at Stetler’s palace of sustainability, also known as the Wabi Sabi Warehouse. Search for the invite on Facebook Events, and stop by to see what treasures come from others’ trash!