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Wednesday 19 October 2011

re..dress

Lebanese haute couture designer Ziad Ghanem launched in London right about the time upcycling was growing out of something your grandma did to make ends meet and flying its nest to set a course to become, a decade later, the hottest trend since the last hottest trend.  Ghanem works with 100% upcycled materials and has a magpie twinkle in his eye for vintage fabrics.   If, unlike upcycling, he hasn't flown across your radar yet his 2012 ready to wear spring/summer collection will give you a clue as to the spectacular nature of the ready to dare, art sensations he has created. 









Monday 17 October 2011

re...tread

Tyres are not the most inspiring of base materials for an upcycle.  I'm sure in the 70's or whatever decade it was when 'man' first got a light bulb idea and rolled them into the garden to plant geraniums, it was a pretty funky moment but it's just not the done thing now.  Forty years later it's all about the filigree and fantastical.  Wim delvoye is a Belgian neoconceptual artist who's works have shocked and awed in equal measure.  Yong Ho Ji is Korean and studied fine art  (NY) and sculpture (Korea) and has exhibited these moody mutant mythos conceptions, consistently around the world for almost a decade.   












Sunday 16 October 2011

re...read

It's a bit of a guilty pleasure in upcycling circles to enjoy repurposed books. I don't know why, I can't find anyone who will say why, it just seems to feel a bit ...wrong.  I personally love it when it's done well (and I've seen some horrors that have made me cringe, not because of the use of a book but because of the terrible design or the awful execution of the idea).  The thoughtful transformation of a book from a literary to a visual or design piece of art does something wonderful to me, it makes me catch my breath, exhale it sharply, or swear under it that I didn't think of that.   Ryuta Iida from Japan ticks all of the breathometer boxes, in fact he make me want to cry, the way you might when you take in a stunning landscape or an act of kindness. Su Blackwell is a London based artist, she borrows from fairy stories and folk lore to create striking 3D sculptures.  Some of her work is a bit whimsical for my taste but these fabulous butterfly swarms are right up my street.












Saturday 15 October 2011

re...purposed plush

Dutch design duo Tejo Remy and Rene veenhuzzein  and Argentian born visual artist Augustina Woodgate are making it a misnomer for parents to use the words 'don't throw your things on the floor'.   Remyveenhuizen's  repurposed blankets to  touchyfeely floor rugs are not just a fine design they were created for children with epilepsy to brighten up their surroundings.   Woodgates zingin' rugs are made from the skins of preloved teddies, and are definately lushplush.  As a visual artist she works to foster exchanges between people rather than encounters between viewer/object.











Friday 14 October 2011

re...claimed

The most obvious beauty of reclaimed wood is the environmental benefits.  The other is patina.  Patination is the effect of time and the elements on metal and wood and shows the history of every hand that ever polished, waxed or cared for the material in it's lifetime.  Brooklyn based, Argentinian furniture designer Roberto Gil and Brazilian Artist Hugo Franca  definately retain the wow factor when working with reclaimed wood.











Thursday 13 October 2011

re...pair

Upcycling is part of our consciousness of, and attempts at healing, the damage we're doing to the planet and ourselves.   I worked on Lee Mingwei's Mending Project last year at the Liverpool biennial, and he's featured here with Karen Margolis because they both work with themes of damage and mending.  When Mingwei lost a close friend in the 9/11 tragedy his response was to take clothes from his closet that needed repair and started to mend. It was a cathartic experience for him and the first seed of an idea for the project.  Karen's work explores internal mechanisms as well as damage/mending through intimate expressions of how we are touched by circumstances of life. Margolis will be exhibiting at the   Rockland Center for the Arts, NY  in 2012.    If you're in New York  at the end of this month Mingwei will be doing a public presentation at the Museum of Chinese in America.                    


Karen Margolis












Visitors to the Mending Project brought items that had  been damaged,  menders repaired the tear in a visible way using threads from spools on the wall. The threads remained attached and over time created a delicate web between the mended items and the spools.  During the process, conversations between the menders and the mendees revealed intimate and touching aspects of the lives of both. 





Wednesday 12 October 2011

re...cycle bicycle

When you can't ride it re-devise it. 












...the most shared about bicycle upcycle on the web. 

Christian Petersen  


Sunday 9 October 2011

re...vamp: The good, the rad and the snuggly

 Some artists, organisations, designers and individuals who are not just good, they’re amazing and what they create is any one, and sometimes all of a list of purposeful, life saving, life enhancing, awe inspiring, beautiful or just downright funky.

Niels Craens is a graphic designer who used his design skills to respond to the problem of what to do with cardboard drinks packages that can't be recycled, because of their aluminium content and plastic cap.  He created a lamp that when illuminated reveals the hidden words 'Enjoy Twice'.


Mary Ellen Croteau recommisions plastic bottlecaps into intriguing strings of colour. She reached the creative limitations of bottletop towers and so raised the bar by putting herself in the picture.




Aurora Robeson is one of my favourite upcycling artists her 3D plastic debris sculptures are beautiful and reflect the fragility of our eco system, her graffitesque junk mail collages are fresh as citrus fruit.


Upcycle Living is a company with a philosophy based around 'affordable, conscious living', They make dwellings out of old shipping containers.  One of their best proposals was to ship disaster relief supplies to Haiti in containers that could then be upcycled into living space.




Finally, Mr Tedi is a fab idea for reusing old clothing, Mrs Jermyn takes shirts that don't fit anymore and makes snuggly, style conscious teddybears with all the lush and none of the cheesy plush.



The artists and companies in this post are the tip of an upcycling iceburg and if you've found yourself wondering how the hell people come up with these ideas and whether you could do it yourself,  I would say that if you're going to make a half worthy attempt at creating something, beautiful, functional and worthwile  from the funkiest of junk, approach upcycling something like a wonky archaelogist, each piece in its raw state holds clues not so much as to what it was, but how to approach it's transformation from a waste item into a piece of art, so ignore what it used to be and you should find what and how it wants to become'.

Saturday 8 October 2011

Upcycling: It's nothing new

 

I love upcycling, I've always done it and it satisfies me to see the internet overflowing with sites dedicated to it. I love cringeing at the twee, being wowed by the truly inventive, being awed by the beauty of the art and marvelling at the staggering proliferation of upcycled stuff. But what is it, why do we do it and why is it here?

The term itself was coined about 10 years ago to describe 'the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value'. Who coined the word changes with every bit of copy you read about it so let’s just say, it wasn’t here and now it is because someone, somewhere decided it was going to be so.

Although the adjective is relatively fresh and public awareness of it even fresher the process itself is nothing new, it‘s as old as we are. It’s just that we love to label, it makes us feel secure and in control, it's part of what makes us Human and we've always done it (think Adam and genesis). We create new labels to describe existing things and we’ve reinvented what was already there (think wheel). Like most trends, the process of upcycling hasn't just arrived it's been here for time and is just swelling into public awareness now because it seems to be part of the zeitgeist of the times.

If, as a random example in time we take the 70's when I was a child and skateboards were fantabulous new fangled things and my parents couldn't afford to buy me one I was presented with a cupboard door on a pair of rollerskates that had a broken strap and ...TaDaaa.  Before that my Uncle would make us 'mini-stilts' out of wood blocks and old rope. We made fishing rods out of car aerials (sorry Mr Thorley), cotton and bent pins and kept our catch in jam jars. We made musical instruments out of coconut halves, out of old bottle tops and sweetie tubes with peas in. We raided the bins for tin cans and string and made prototypes for the mobile phone.

Did we know we were inventing? Did we know we were upcycling? No, because the label hadn't been coined yet we were just doing what we've always done - making something out of nothing and making funk out of junk, then when we got bored we threw away our new fangled thing and found something else to amuse ourselves with.

We did it then because we couldn't afford the better alternative. Before that we did it because there was no alternative (think cavemen and flints).  Maybe we do it now because for so long we have been credit enabled to get and have the better alternative, the better better alternative and the alternative we didn't even know we wanted yet because the only alternative to that is to be the only one in the playground, street, office or pub, with a ‘so yesterday’ whateveritis. And because now we are wondering out loud if this is really the best way of judging who we are and what we‘re worth.

Maybe we do it now because we’re coming to realise (oops) that the leaning tower of throwaway comes with a price. An environmental one, a financial one, an unworkable and unsustainable one. The impact of having all this new and newer stuff to define ourselves and our status by, is affecting the planet we live on to the point of destruction. The stress of working to buy status is affecting our quality of life to a point beyond saturation and we are sinking and drowning in our own spin on what makes us valuable and with the recession and all that jazz, it‘s right up in our faces.

Upcycling isn’t new, it’s just the latest tag in the jostle of labels that allows us to consider embracing a life away from the teetering edge of status enhancing stuff without losing style face, without admitting that we started to lose our way when we grew out of the fields into the cities and began to lose our links with sustainable living.

I’m not anti-consumerism, having new things is fab, it makes us feel good. Inventing new things causes us to marvel at how clever we are (we are clever, just too clever for our own good sometimes). Inventing and creating evolves us, it facilitates us in making leaps into the unknown future of ourselves and without this ability we would be dead as dinosaurs. Wanting something truly marvellous is all good, but somewhere around the fifites designers really started to tune into the idea of cranking up inventing and creating not as evolution, but as a process of waste making as a method of money making. The production off button got broke and our tsunami of stuff now threatens to overwhelm us and we’re really realising our mistakes (think American Indian proverb ‘money can‘t be eaten‘).

Since then the waste making moneymakers have sold us faster bigger better, more not less, faster smaller better, less is more, more of less is more and less of less is more. In the process they’ve more or less lost touch with and sight of the dry land we once lived in synch with and are drowning while pretending to wave.

In this sea of fiscal and lifestyle chaos aren’t we all looking for a way to actually wave instead of pretending to? Don’t we want with a passion a way of living that gives us less stress and more time, money, energy and satisfaction? Don’t we really want, but don’t know how, to turn back the tide.

I think this is the real reason we are embracing the idea of upcycling. It tunes us into a more satisfying and sustainable way of being and puts us in touch with a community of people who actually are waving, who always have and always are keeping calm and carrying on. People who are doing what they’ve always done which is staying in tune with the undercurrents hidden beneath the surface and riding the waves when they come.  This isn't sustainable living as a fad, they’ve found a way to make money out of the waste that the wastemakers made to make money. To borrow a scriptural term they ‘live in the world but are not of it’

When we were screaming at the birth of Pop, they were untangled folk roots that have grown a whole new scene of music, art and culture. When we were wondering if CFC was a football club they were recycling, reclaiming and re-vamping their way to a multi million pound industry. They’ve shown us how to find the value in vintage and the riches in retro. They’ve shabby, eco and industrial chic’d the cast off and the cast away and in the growing tide of debris created by destructive living, without missing a beat they now reach around the circling trend hunters seeking this fabulous next best thing called upcycling and grab a handful of nothing, make it into something and sell it on to you. Ethical, sustainable, financially and environmentally viable, just the way it’s always been.