Anchorage Daily News

One woman's junk is another woman's treasure, but what happens when they join forces to transform everyone's junk into treasure while showing others how to do the same?

They end up with a place like Unique Ways Studio, a cozy Midtown space dedicated to art through conservation and conservation through art. Here, artists Linda Warford and Jerelyn Miyashiro want to turn bags, boxes, paper, CD cases, scrap metal, electrical wire and all kinds of waste into objects of beauty and utility.

By teaching workshops on how to weave 56 grocery bags into totes, "I'm hoping people come out of here thinking about not using so many plastic bags in the first place," Miyashiro said.

"People have a green heart," Warford added, "and they walk out of here with a lifetime skill. We're incorporating and doing things in a green way intentionally and hope that those ideas and habits gets passed on."

Though its programming is still evolving, Unique Ways offers everything from collaborative studio hours to workshops on bookbinding with waste paper and making totes from plastic grocery bags, always stressing how the ethos and aesthetics of reusing materials entwine, Miyashiro said.

"Everybody who comes to these classes has been saving things and not sure what to do with them," she said. "But they know things are precious and can be used."

For years now, multimedia artists like Sheila Wyne have come to the same conclusion, often for different reasons.

"I'm very interested in the history of things, things that have existed in time," Wyne said. "Something emanates from artwork made from things that already have a past history, a life, intentions behind its initial creation."

She started making art with found objects 20 years ago.

"I wasn't thinking of it nearly so much in terms of environmental issues at that point," she explained. "But because of where I started, it's been very easy to see the transition to other reasons for doing it. There just seems to be good reason to get as many uses as you can get out of something rather than throwing it into the dump."

GREEN AND THRIFTY

Artists rummage through trash for plywood, mirrors, lampshades and all manner of construction debris as a matter of course, but Martha Brigham and Zoe Oakley take dumpster diving to the next level.

The two artists turn scrap metal and other junk into furniture, sculpture and wall art, finding their materials at yard sales, on Craigslist, at construction sites or on the side of the road. Sometimes they get the inside skinny on house remodels or office projects and scavenge what gets ditched. People bring them things, happy to see stuff reused.

They salvage everything from doorbells and light plate covers to metal parts and trinkets, as in the cute little "candy" sign sitting on the counter of Modern Dwellers Chocolate Lounge, their coffee, truffle and art shop in Midtown.

The two have been scrounging artists since the early 1980s.

"In art school, people were doing stuff with reclaimed things, but the concept of recycling was small," Oakley said. "The whole renewable energy-conservation thing has become mainstream lately. It's about time; it seems like it has taken forever."

They were impatient for change but probably out of the ordinary, she said. "I mean, we get Plenty magazine."

Reusing junk goes beyond green politics, however.

"Our materials are like beautiful relics that have been abandoned," said Brigham. "It's eye-opening to notice something discarded and then see its instant beauty, history, the life in it."

The nature of art can make going green a mind-bending process. Artists use materials, resources, fuel; they consume to make consumables.

"One can get neurotic about balancing the consumptive aspect with the final product," said Brigham. "You can get neurotic about asking if it's right, if it's environmentally conscious."

So Brigham and Oakley make conscious choices about shipping, collecting, welding, driving their truck and using materials while feeling good about making furniture or art locally for people who might otherwise buy something shipped from Europe or China.

"We both need art in our lives, both making it and being around it," said Oakley. "Yes, there's the consumption and the collecting, but we tend to be frugal anyway from years of being starving artists."

Necessity often drives the desire to reuse materials, but living and making art in a thrifty way reinforces itself, said Wyne.

"For most artists, it's about getting materials we can't get otherwise," she said. "We work on a limited budget, so the first notion is, 'Hey, someone's going to be able to use it, so let's hold onto it.'

"There's that thrifty quality, but the longer you do it, the more you see how that thriftiness is appropriate in light of other things, other reasons, like the problems with landfills."

Though always a collector of objects found or dropped on her doorstep by those who know or hear of her art, Wyne has recently made conservation a more pronounced element of her work.

She has two public art projects in the works right now, one that reuses old light poles at a middle school in Juneau, and another in which she hopes to use six to 10 trees from a construction site rather than disturbing habitat to collect them.

"Here's the conundrum," she said, referring the latter project, still in the proposal stage. "There's one aspect that's really specific about the environment in that it's going to reuse material; but then there's another aspect that involves a fused-glass piece that will be made in Germany, which means I would be flying to Germany, and there's a huge carbon footprint with that."

So though Wyne thinks about how to reconfigure larger-scale pieces without always resorting to new materials, she knows she's not a model for a "green" movement in art making.

And, really, who is?

"I don't see it as conflict, except in a healthy way," said Wyne. "It's humorous in some ways. It's good to keep a healthy perspective and not be so self-righteous."

BAGGS' BAGS

Even learning to make art (or any subject, for that matter) demands a huge outlay of resources, prompting institutions like the art department at the University of Alaska Anchorage to revisit how it does things, from minimizing the impact of hazardous materials in printmaking to extracting silver from the photochemistry process to smelt back into pure metal, said Mariano Gonzales, chairman of the department.

When it comes to subject matter, however, some artists have shelved traditional mediums for more green ones. After going to art school as a painter, Baggs McKelvey returned to Fairbanks and adopted grocery bags as her medium.

She began by collecting seven 55-gallon garbage bags full of grocery bags for her Plastic Bag Trilogy, a series of installations at The Annex Gallery in Ester. Since 2005, she has reused those bags over and over, stringing them into webs or knotting and twisting them into sculptural forms.

In her installations, she uses bags in consort with light and consumer sounds like cash registers and ATM machines, much of it collected online and reused in her work. The aesthetics of painting still dominates the way she thinks, she said, but using bags lets her address her ideas on consumption, conservation and the value of what people consume.

In "Doodle May," a sorrowful figure made for a group show called "Doll," McKelvey wanted to allude to the way rag dolls were perpetuated through time via other materials. She was also "thinking about plastic bags as becoming such an integral part of our lifestyle and how we can reassign the value of those bags," she said.

Using grocery bags isn't new, of course. Many people make totes and other objects out of them and alter their value in the process, said McKelvey. She shaped most of her bags into string that can be used in multiple ways, for example.

"I've used them in three major installations and two smaller works, but I don't think I've depleted their usefulness," she said. "They don't degrade and, from what I've read, they will eventually break up into small particles but never leave the environment."

A good reason to use fewer bags, perhaps, but not to get dogmatic, so instead of hammering people on the head about consumption, "I try to bring a sense of playfulness to my work," said McKelvey. "I want to take a mundane object like a plastic bag and elevate it."

Well, some of the time, anyway, because now and again she forgets her canvas bags at home and appreciates her art material as bags and nothing more.

Find Dawnell Smith online at adn.com/contact/dsmith or call 257-4587.

WORKSHOP: Unique Ways Studio will hold its August "Junk to Funk" eco-art workshop on bookbinding with wastepaper from 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Aug. 20 at the studio, 207 E. Northern Lights Blvd., Suite 112. The three-session workshop costs $30 and culminates with blank books that can be used multiple ways. Find out more at www.uniqueways studio.com or by contacting Linda Warford (441-4601) or Jerelyn Miyashiro (310-3964).

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