Functional Upcycling

Objective: Students will choose an everyday object (e.g., birdhouse, lamp, container, purse) and reimagine it by constructing a sculptural version using non-traditional materials. They will maintain the object’s function but add a layer of artistic interpretation through their choice of materials and design.

Answer these questions BEFORE you start:

Is there a message, theme or subject? What is it?
Is it 2D or 3D?
What materials do you plan to use?
Are the materials already colorful or will you have to change the color with paint?
Did an artist or photo inspire you? If so, how will your artwork be different?
What will the artwork do? Is it wearable, does it work, is it sculptural...?
How will you glue it together? What glue will you use?

Possible Material Options:

Comic Books

Old Art Supplies

Plastic Bags

Trash

Bottle Caps

Sticks

Wire

Plastic Bottles

Newspaper

Buttons

Cardboard

Music Notes

Magazines

Cans

Gears/Old Nails, Screws

Fabric

CD's

Records

Examples

Ketchup Drawing

Coffee Painting

Wearable Art

Artists that Repurpose:

Environmental Artists

Olafur Eliasson

For “Your waste of time,” Olafur Eliasson displayed pieces of ice that broke off from Iceland’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull. Exhibited in a refrigerated gallery space powered by solar panels, the ice “sculptures” represented 800 years of Earthly existence, putting human’s physical experience in perspective. “The obvious lesson of Mr. Eliasson’s installation, ‘Your waste of time,’ is that global warming is wreaking havoc on nature,” Ken Johnson wrote in The New York Times last year.

Mark Baugh-Sasaki

Through his inventive sculptures, photographs and videos, Mark Baugh-Sasaki explores the intersection of the industrial and natural worlds. He documents our collective need to civilize and assimilate nature, and captures imagined moments in the evolution of altered landscapes. He works with basic industrial materials, such as steel, aluminum, wood and glass, and transforms them into organic forms that recall their journey between the natural and industrial realms.

Thomas Hirschhorn

Thomas Hirschhorn is a Swiss multi-media artist who currently lives and works in Paris, France. He creates immersive environments, challenging the viewer to navigate spaces that have been inundated by the artifacts of consumption.

Andy Goldsworthy

British sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist Andy Goldsworthy is known for his site-specific land art made from natural, found materials. He crafts his installations out of rocks, ice, leaves, or branches, then carefully documents how the ephemeral installations change and wither over time. “It’s not about art,” he explains. “It’s just about life and the need to understand that a lot of things in life do not last.”

Nils-Udo

German artist Nils-Udo celebrates the beauty of nature by working with found materials—such as leaves and branches—to create stunning, site-specific works. He’s known for creating “utopias” that transform the land into mysterious, dreamlike realms. From delicately arranged petals scattered on the surface of a pond, to spectacular nests formed from twigs, leaves, and wildflowers, his works look as though they were created by busy woodland fairies or creatures of the forest.

Richard Shilling

Inspired by the work of Goldsworthy, British artist Richard Shilling uses natural materials gathered from the environment to create outdoor sculptural installations. Exploring form and color, his most recognizable works include his stained glass-like sculptures made from colorful leaves, and his stacked rock totems. He tells My Modern Met, “Nature art is simply just one way of expressing the joy of feeling at one with the environment.”

Gabriel Orozco

For the 2012 installation “Sandstars,” Gabriel Orozco arranged over 1,200 objects from the Isla Arena, Mexico trash repository on the Guggenheim Museum’s floor, accompanied by a dozen large, gridded photographs depicting the individual objects in a studio setting. The found treasures bring hints of the ignored wastelands into a gallery setting, forcing viewers to confront the effects of industrial and commercial refuse.

Aida Sulova

A Kyrgyz street artist named Aida Sulova confronted the rampant garbage problem in Bishkek by using trash bins as a canvas. According to Wooster Collective, the street artist pastes photographic images of open mouths on garbage cans throughout the city to “remind people that what they throw into the world, eventually ends up inside us.”

Chris Jordan

Photographer Chris Jordan puts consumption into perspective with his series “Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption.” His works show the debris we as a society leave behind, from massive dumps of cell phones, to crushed cars and circuit boards, all squeezed together in hypnotic quantities.

Mathilde Roussel

French artist Mathilde Roussel created a series of living grass installations that take the shape of human beings. Made of recycled material and fabric filled with soil and wheat grass seeds, the pieces are meant to symbolize the centrality of food. “Observing nature and being aware of what and how we eat makes us more sensitive to food cycles in the world — of abundance, of famine — and allows us to be physically, intellectually and spiritually connected to a global reality,” the artist explains.

Nils Udo

Nils-Udo is one of the main figures of the environmental art movements. He has been creating this form of art for decades now and he is known for creating “utopias” in nature, trying to prove that they can be real.

Found Object Artists

Dan Steinhilber

Steinhilber was trained in drawing and painting, but in his work he is continually pushing everyday materials—often found and then altered—into large-scale sculptural forms. He has worked with garbage bags, chain-link fencing, plastic water bottles, and obsolete household appliances.

Leo Sewell

His sculptures are composed of recognizable objects of plastic, metal and wood. These objects are chosen for their color, shape, texture, durability and patina; then they are assembled using nails, bolts, and screws. The outdoor sculptures are constructed of stainless steel, brass, or aluminum found objects which are welded together.

Michelle Stitzlein

Her work is created with recycled and found materials. Items such as old garden hose, electrical wire, computer cables, piano keys, mini blinds, china shards, license plates, and bottle caps are utilized to create imagery and abstractions that come from her imagination.

Harriet Mead

Most of my larger work is made using sheet steel with scrap pieces incorporated for details. These sculptures are often life sized and are sometimes mistaken for bronzes or even the real thing. I also make ‘found object’ sculptures that are made entirely of scrap tools and discarded metal items.

Jason Mecier

Pop Artist Jason Mecier creates one of a kind outrageous mosaic portraits. He meticulously fabricates anybody out of anything, from Kevin Bacon out of bacon, to Honey Boo Boo out of 25 lbs. of trash. Jason’s artwork has been featured everywhere from Entertainment Weekly to The New York Times, on TV shows like Glee, Martha and Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party, The Today Show and TMZ, as well as music videos by Pink and Pitbull.

Kyle Bean

Kyle Bean is a London based artist with a passion for handcrafted design and tactile illustration. He creates playful, concept-driven imagery and animation for a variety of editorial and commercial projects as well as installations for fashion brands and events. Kyle’s work is usually characterised by a whimsical and meticulous reappropriation of everyday materials and handcrafted techniques. Kyle particularly enjoys problem solving and developing witty solutions to project briefs.

Junk Art

Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen

Found Object

Edgar Artis

Armenian fashion illustrator Edgar Artis uses stylized paper cut outs and everyday objects to create beautiful dresses. His creative fashion sketches include such items as rose petals, various plants and food, even buildings.

Jane Perkins

Beads, buttons and other found material portraits

Andrew Chase

Aluminum Dinosaurs

Fish Sculpture

These fish are made from plastic bottles and the recycling project was built to make a statement on sea pollution due to all of the plastic pollution in the ocean.

Augusto Esquivel

Esquivel creates beautiful pieces of art using buttons by hanging them from fishing lines. The buttons represent different everyday objects as they are hanging in midair. In one of his works, the buttons represent a bundle of colorful floating balloons.

Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan

The husband-and-wife team of Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, who emigrated from the Philippines to Australia in 2006, address themes of displacement, change, memory and community. Their large-scale installations often reflect their own migratory experiences, while conveying points of exchange and communication that extend beyond borders.

Veronika Richterova

Bottles made from PET and esspecialy from PE are very inspiring for me thanks to their light quality, which is close to glass characteristics. That‘s why I started to create light objects, chandeliers and lamps.

Sandhi Schimmel

American artist Sandhi Schimmel created this image using tax forms and political junk mail. Her other works are created using paper waste including menus, junk mail, greeting cards and advertising brochures.

Astro Boy

This Astro Boy pixel art was made from 138,000 recycled Tokyo Metro tickets and was on display at the Shinjuku Takashimaya Department Store. It was created by volunteers to mark the opening of Tokyo’s new Fukutoshin subway line.

Atom Bomb

This Atom Bomb recyled art was created by Cuban born artists Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz. There other artworks also utilize recycled clothing obtained from waste bins and second hand shipping companies in Miami.

Michelle Reader

Since 1997, Michelle Reader has been working to make recycled materials into sculptures, often incorporating mechanical elements such as the working parts of toys and clocks. Her materials come from city dumps, roadsides, and thrift shops, and include both household and industrial waste. “I love the unpredictability of found materials and enjoy the inventiveness necessary to transform them into a sculpture,” she says. “I try wherever possible to use materials that are reclaimed, things with a history that have been discarded and might otherwise end up in landfill.”

Ptolemy Elrington

Parking lots and roadsides everywhere are adorned with damaged and lost hubcaps. But where most of us see garbage, Ptolemy Elrington sees beauty and value. “I believe that things utilitarian, or which give pleasure to the eye have the highest value, he says. “I come across many things which have been abandoned and find something more in them than their intrinsic worthlessness.” He particularly enjoys working with hubcaps because—while they look nice—they really serve very little purpose. “They’re automatically rubbish when on the side of the road," he says. "But with a little effort and imagination I transform them into something which gives people a great deal more pleasure.”

Wim Delvoye

While Belgian artist Wim Delvoye isn’t the first person to create art with used tires, he might just be the most talented name in the niche. That’s because his utterly gorgeous creations manage to maintain the structure of the tires while incorporating elements from nature, such as flowers and vines, so the viewer thinks of the delicate beauty of Mother Earth while never forgetting that they are looking at something totally industrial. The artist uses no mechanical devices during the reworking process to make his masterpieces, and tough car and tractor tires take a very long time to manually carve and sculpt.

Rodney "Rodrigo" McCoubrey

Unlike many artists working with recycled materials, who feel their work carries a serious and somber meaning, the theme of Rodney McCoubrey’s work is “fun”—and it certainly shows. In fact, many of his works look like vivid and beautiful reinterpretations of children’s drawings. While the San Diego resident is happy to gather materials out of dumpsters and next to roadsides in any city, he particularly loves fishing for inspiration around dumpsites in Baja California—a preference that no doubt influences his work.

Jane Perkins

Before starting a career in the arts, Jane Perkins was first a nurse for 17 years and then a stay-at-home mom for 10 more. It wasn’t until she started studying textiles at the Somerset College of Arts and Technology in 2006 that she realized how much she enjoyed working with recycled materials and, since 2008, she’s been working exclusively in that vein. Like McCoubrey, Jane feels recycled art is a fun challenge. She particularly enjoys the unexpected surprises she uncovers as she takes inspiration from objects she discovers at recycling centers and junkyards. These days, though, she does a lot less foraging for objects to use in her work—once people in her neighborhood found out what she did, they started leaving bags of their unwanted junk on her doorstep.

Robert Bradford

From robots to race cars, Miguel Rivera’s creations prove that just because a hard drive has crashed doesn’t mean it is completely useless. Unsurprisingly, the artist found his inspiration in his day job as a systems administrator on an overseas U.S. Air Force base, where he came across ample broken hard drives and decided to do something with them. His first creation was a race car made from 33 hard drives. The body was mostly one whole drive, but the wheels took eight discs a piece. As he started making more and more designs, the creations became more and more complex until he created his most detailed creation to date: the massive robot he calls his masterpiece. The robot contains 14 whole laptop hard drives, pieces from 18 other drives, and a few other spare computer parts.

Leo Sewell

While most artists working with recycled materials get into the idea later on in life, Leo Sewell grew up in a dump and was assembling pieces of trash together even as a boy. Since then, he’s actually developed and mastered his own assemblage technique involving nuts, bolts, and screws, enabling his creations to bear striking likenesses to the creatures he models them after while still allowing the bits of trash inside to be easily seen and recognized.