Not all of Central Indiana’s litter heads to landfill. Several Indianapolis artists take abandoned debris and give it new life.
In a small, second-floor Factory Arts District studio, Rachel Hedges makes surreal creatures out of hand-me-downs and thrifted sweaters. Gina Lee Robbins tinkers with motorcycle parts she found roadside, turning them into sculptures. Danielle Felice Riede collects paint detritus and transforms the scraps into new works of art.
The artists say the shape, feel and emotional charge of the old forms – wool cardigans, dried-up acrylic and highway trash – aren’t abandoned in the creation of something new. Rather, they often shape the process.
Sculpture, à la local woods and roadways
Lee Robbins started upcycling foraged objects when she was a child and has yet to quit.
It started with a wedding gift: Unabashed and nine years old, Lee Robbins plucked enough melaleuca seeds to string together a necklace for her ballet teacher.
Nowadays, Lee Robbins regularly exhibits her pieces across the country. Her materials, however, are usually locally sourced. On long walks and drives throughout central Indiana, Lee Robbins searches out the items that don’t belong: nails, buttons, a large fallen branch. Sometimes, she scoops the trash into a bag and it remains just garbage. Occasionally, an object strikes a nerve.
For an upcoming show at Re:Public at 10 East Arts, Lee Robbins is working on a piece crafted from abandoned shards of two motorcycle fronts.
“One of these motorcycle fronts is really bright orange,” Lee Robbins said. “Obviously, it caught my eye when I was driving.”
So, she doubled back, pulled over and scooped it up.
Paint scraps find a new form
When word got out that Riede was working with leftovers while she was attending art school in Germany, her classmates started bringing her their paint scraps.
“Clearly, it’s trash that would go in the dustbin otherwise. But when you peel the paint scraps out of a bowl or off of a palette, it sort of reveals all of these beautiful patterns and colors that remind me of nature,” said Riede, who has seen the flutter of butterfly wings and the curve of a rose petal in leftover strips of paint.
Fashioning the pieces of dried-up paint into something new became a giant puzzle, Riede said.
Now Riede, a professor at the Herron School of Art and Design, teaches her students how to steep their creative process in the world around them.
In a class focused on “eco-friendly” painting, Riede and her students take a trek to collect flowers, berries and bark. Back in the studio, the class learns to make pigment and paste from the foraged goods. The art her students create from these adventures, Riede said, draws inspiration from that specific place and time.
“You think more deeply about our connection to nature when you do something like create paint and artwork from it,” she said.
Closet leftovers transformed into children’s toys
Rachel Hedges is not your average toymaker. Hedges scours thrift stores for wool sweaters, an endeavor now trickier than ever as brands prioritize cheaper, often synthetic fabrics. Then, she starts to sew.
Hedges’ company, Bebito Toys, was born in the early 2000s when homemade goods crafted from natural fibers were all the rage. The style and shape of her toys, on the other hand, are slightly less conventional.
Leo is a striped lion with multicolored patchwork toenails. Gnomie, a nine-inch long creature of cashmere, dons an oversized pink cap, with three bells attached at the tip. Dolores, a multi-color soft-bodied plushie, comes with bulging, occasionally off-kilter eyes and a button-down frock. She’s also a librarian and probably has cankles, Hedges said.
Dolores didn’t originally come with a backstory: It evolved over 20 years as Hedges crafted different iterations of the wooly creature.
As customers perused and purchased Hedges’s wares, they told jokes and riffed of Dolores’s ominous countenance – creating a sort of local, wooly legend in the process.
Sophie Hartley is an IndyStar environment reporter. You can reach her at sophie.hartley@indystar.com or on X at @sophienhartley.
IndyStar’s environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: These Indy artists are making toys and art out of litter and leftovers
Reporting by Sophie Hartley, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
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By Sophie Hartley, Indianapolis Star | USA TODAY Network
