Art From Trash

HA Schults with the art from trash

Everyone knows the phrase, “reduce, reuse, recycle”, but whether they do it is another matter. What about upcycling? No, it’s not biking up a hill. It means converting waste materials into something new and useful. In this case, arts. Artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster create beauty from ugliness. View their work from one side and you will see a pile groaning with toilet paper roll, crushed soda cans and rusty scrap metal. Look like a haphazard scrap heap right?

In fact, the duo spend hours crafting yesterday’s junk to exact positions, so when a projector shines on it at the right angle , the resulting silhouette is a thing of beauty like the sleek shadow of a beautiful woman or a dirt bike or a man in a top hat. Simply put, their work brings order in chaos.

From trash you say? It look awesome to me. 

Elsewhere, German concept artists HA Schults has built his own private army. Since 1996, his thousands of silent sentinels have stood in formation around New York City parks, public plazas and even the Great Wall of China. In 2008, these soldiers could be seen standing in Antartica’s wastelands, as artful ambassadors for sustainability. Made from computer parts, cans and other scrap, it took Schult and his 30 assistants half a year to complete his sculptures.

Another work of HA Schults

The travelling Trash People aren’t Schults’s only contribution to recycling awareness. In 2010, he even created a hotel made entirely of garbage. As with the Trash People, the mobile hotel has travelled across the world, erected in South Korea, Brazil, Pakistan , Vietnam and several others countries. “The philosophy of this hotel is to expose the damage we are causing to the sea and coastline, he says.

Given the weight of the issue at hand, his question to humanity is relatively simple: “Do we really want this world? We live in an era of trash and we are running the risk of becoming the trash ourselves.”