How things get recycled in my work

Everything is fodder for more work. I make things big then I cut them down to go in a journal or to make a cover for a journal or I cut it into strips to be a part of a weaving. Or I mess up a crochet project and the yarn won’t unravel easily so I put it in the pile to be used as collage materials or to be pieced together in something larger. I doodle on a dyed piece of paper. I cut it up for collage. This is all part of the cycle (and recycling) of my work.

Here’s an original image I drew and painted, then a copy of the image in another book and then what that looks like after it took a dip in the ocean. If you’ve never seen the Into the Unknown video which is about this project, please go check it out!!

Nothing new under the sun

I used to think I needed to be original! All the time!! Create whole, brand new things from scratching in the dirt! Every! Single! Day! It’s exhausting. And unsustainable. And honestly? Kinda not very fun. Because there’s so much pressure. And nothing wilts my creativity like pressure to perform.

But also? You aren’t making anything new. Neither am I. It’s all endless remixes. All the time. Maybe some of them work. Maybe some of them don’t work. And maybe you are lucky enough to have made a few things as part of that cycle.

So what is sustainable? Being in conversation with yourself. You know you best. You know what you make and what you like. Keep building and riffing on that. Keep remixing your own stuff. For however long it stays interesting. And when you loose interest, be ready to toss a bunch of stuff up into the air and see where it lands. Yes, I mean that literally! Sometimes a game of 52-card pickup but make it art supplies is a great way to change things up.

Or work with a buddy where you can trade and remix some of their stuff while they are doing the same with yours. Collaboration is an excellent way to introduce lots of new material into your cycle. Working with fellow artists is one of my favorite things to do because it’s a well that just keeps replenishing and that makes it feel if not effortless than at least easier.

Recycling crochet

Some of my favorite things I’ve recycled/made are from crochet bits that my dog chewed on or pieces I couldn’t frog when I decided the pattern wasn’t working for me. (The image at the top of this article is a shawl I started and didn’t like but the yarn wouldn’t unravel so it went into the reuse bin.)

I have a whole series called Woman’s Work where I took old crochet pieces from the women of my family and gave them new life on canvas. They were pieces with holes or stains or that were disintegrating from the passage of time so recycling them seemed like a great use for them.

Recycling books

Altering books is a whole sub genera of art journaling. This King Arthur book I removed about half the pages to accommodate all the collage work I did in it. The Season of Music book was a coffee table book on the band R.E.M. that I also removed pages from it to make spreads about all kinds of music. The book with the green cover is a children’s primer that I cut the book guts out of and rebound the covers using Coptic stitch (notice it has a page from the R.E.M. book). Then all of those pages I removed from all of those books became collage material. If you want to see more of these two books, the links are to my YouTube flip throughs. The green Coptic stitch book you can read more about here – because surprisingly?? I’ve never made a video flipthrough of this book.

Again, giving these old things (books in this case) new life is satisfying in a way I can’t quite explain. I’m always on the lookout for used books to have on hand for art purposes. I’ve wanted to do another altered book like the King Arthur book for a long time but I haven’t found just the right one. But I trust the process, the universe will deliver it at some point.

Recycling art

This is a fairly new area for me. When I first stared making things I used a lot of collage material that was other people’s art: magazines, books, scrapbook papers, or other papers. So any given page from one of my art journals maybe had copyrighted materials on them. Using them for collage and art is covered under fair use copyright but making copies of that to sell isn’t. This drastically cut down on my ability to make copies of what I was making.

About five years ago, I started deliberately making my own collage material so I could make copies of my work. And then last year I set out to photograph as many pages from my journals as possible so I could print and use them as collage materials. So that’s been slowly creeping into my stuff and I love it!

The endless cycle of idea and action

I was working on posting new journals to my Etsy store this week and in digging around in the bin I found a book prototype I made a few summers ago.

It’s a Venetian blind book. And I made it out of a piece of art I started a year or so before and discarded when I realized it wasn’t working. The book has been kicking around in my book samples bin for a while and when I pulled it out this week, I knew immediately I wanted to work on it. I want it to be endless sky with a tiny bit of land at the bottom illustrated by collage. I want to restring it with cotton thread instead of waxed because the waxed thread feels terrible. As soon as I opened it this week, I had a vision of what it could be. I knew it had potential when I made it but I didn’t know what that potential looked like.

And ultimately this is why I continually recycle my own work. I’m always making some small thing and setting it aside for it to wait for it’s moment to tell me what it wants to become. And when it does, it’s my job to follow through.

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