CONCEPT

I suppose I first started thinking about found object collages as an art teacher at PS 151 in NYC when Lindsay was Mayor and the NYC Public School budgets were being slashed, with creative programs being first. I had to scrounge for art materials for my students and resorted to all kinds of discarded stuff that could be reconfigured into imaginative creations. I called these findings "beautiful junk". Kids made puppets from old socks, scraps of fabric, discarded buttons. Whole imaginative cities were built from shirt cardboards, shoe boxes and newspapers. Any scrap could be the jumping off point for an imaginative drawing. The children helped to collect recycled junk and we all started looking at our surroundings in a new way.

Fast forward to 7 years ago when I became fascinated with the discarded things I would see on city sidewalks. I observed that there were ubiquitous items that appeared on the streets all over the city - feathers and cigarette butts! Then, I also noticed that different areas had their own specific collections of sidewalk debris. 4 years ago I started picking-up site specific street material. My first collection was from my front door to the garage a block and a half away. I was off and running!

After bagging "stuff", I label the bag with the specific location, sanitize the contents in the microwave or wash metalic items in hot, soapy water. I then create the site specific collage. Sometimes cutting , bending or folding pieces I have found. The process can take me a day or even weeks as I tweak the collage image before gluing everything in place. As I travel to different neighborhoods, I've noticed that the sidewalks themselves are quite artistic, so I photograph them and sometimes incorporate the photo into the collages. More recently, I have added acrylic paint to clllages. So far, I've made collages from sites in NYC, the Bronx, various locations in Florida, Denver, Mt. Pleasant in North Carloina, London, Cornwall, Oxford, Devon in England, The West Highland Way in Scotland, Athens and Corfu in Greece, Bogota in Colombia.

The collages are continuing to evolve as I add my personal creative eye to the objects our culture discards on every street.