The art of recycling

TOM CARDY

Using found materials and objects as art isn't new. There's even a term for it - objet trouve. But it usually applies to an artist making minimal or no alteration to what they've found before calling it art.

Then there are acclaimed artists like kiwi Eve Armstrong, who use found materials and objects in a variety of ways, heavily altering some, minimally altering others.

In the case of Armstrong, who unveils a new sculpture at the City Gallery on Saturday, it's as much about recycling what we throw out - as well as recycling surpluses and manufacturing "seconds".

"Often for me it's what I find. It is to some degree dictated by what I notice and what I see. There's lots around, " she says, as she works on the large sculpture Taking Stock, one of three of her works in the gallery's mammoth group show, Prospect New Zealand Art Now.

Taking Stock follows on from a previous work of the same name Armstrong constructed in Wellington last year, where she asked residents to donate clear and milky-coloured plastic packaging - ideally clean and label free - which usually ends up in recycling bins.

The new sculpture again uses some donated plastic, along with large sheets of transparent and semi- transparent plastic and retail display shelves. It also includes seconds Armstrong sourced from manufacturers, including a pile of containers usually intended to hold biscuits, and some mirrors.

Armstrong is still early in the process of construction. What she will incorporate into the final work - dictated by the space it will occupy in City Gallery - needs to be completed by Saturday's public unveiling.

Armstrong's been working with found and recycled objects and materials for nearly a decade and her sources include secondhand traders and recyclers in Auckland, and manufacturers there and in Petone.

She says she's found it easy to convince manufacturers to donate packaging and other materials. "I will show people photographs of what I've done before and explain it to them. I always invite them to the exhibition and I usually find that people are generous because they are often just going to throw away the material."

While Taking Stock takes shape, other works to be set up are near completion. There's a series of eight panels of different sizes that, from a distance, look like paintings. On closer inspection they aren't canvases but a mix of reused materials, including a plastic fridge tray and the top of a dishwasher. On each, Armstrong has layered signwriters' vinyl offcuts - normally used on advertising billboards - and printed a collage of everyday household objects sourced from junk mail catalogue photographs. Even after the explanation, the panels still look painterly - even beautiful.

The inspiration began several years ago when Armstrong began taking photographs of what had been left at Auckland roadsides for inorganic rubbish collections. Whatever was discarded influenced her work.

"One year there might be a proliferation of suitcases or barbecues. Often a lot of the work that I make is drawn from things that I see ordinarily walking down the street, so I really enjoy at a very formal level the way that people do things. [It's] the way they might pile up their rubbish or paint out graffiti. I find there's something interesting and energetic about that way of making [something] and they would never consider it a beautiful object."

Ruth Buchanan also has three works in Prospect and it includes the return appearance of Older Lovers etc at the gallery, but in a new space.

The work is based on recycling images, objects and memories from her art studies while a student at Wellington High School in the 90s. Now an established artist based in Europe, Older Lovers etc took inspiration from a slide show of New Zealand art Buchanan was shown at the school. Among the images that flashed on to the screen was one of a work by little known early 20th- century New Zealand painter Flora Scales.

What struck Buchanan at the time was that Scales had been to Munich and encountered early ideas about abstract art. She influenced Kiwi modern art pioneer Toss Woollaston. "For me she was always this very specifically important figure, not just in New Zealand painting, but in New Zealand art. But it was someone that I felt I didn't have a real sense of her work or how she worked," Buchanan says from Berlin.

While studying for a master's degree in fine art in Rotterdam, Buchanan says as a New Zealander she found it difficult to place herself in the context of European art practice. It became a subject of her research and Scales was a good example.

Buchanan went to Munich to learn about the artist's time there. As aspects of her research evolved to become an art work, Buchanan got in touch with Wellington High and was told by an art teacher that they no longer used carousel slide projectors to show New Zealand art. Instead, they looked at images on computers. "But she clambered up into the [school's] attic and looked around through all the old jumble of stuff and found a pile of slides. My mum picked them up and posted them to me."

Older Lovers etc incorporates images from the slides, including the sole Scales' work, along with appropriated texts. While it's a digital video, the work uses the sound of a carousel slide projector. One aim is for the viewer to feel as if they are watching a slide show that echoes what she saw in 1996.

"The way I made the video was very lo-fi. I was giving myself a slide show and my video recorded it, so the sound is the live sound of the slide show . . . For me, it was quite important. Lots of us remember that experience of being in school or university and the slide projector's not quite working."

The Details: Prospect: New Zealand Art Now, City Gallery, Wellington, November 26 to February 12

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