I like to make sculptural work that has animated qualities… I also like flowers… and recycled materials… here’s the synthesis of all that…
well, a drop from that bucket perhaps. I have more than a few of these babies kicking around. A few years ago I finally build a display case (pictured above) for my flowers to live in between sales.
background for the curious: I wanted to recreate the daisies blowing in the strong Sackville winds, using recycled materials. In 2004-2005 between sheltering some musicians and getting to know my first guitar, there were now broken and old guitar strings in my life. I also had a plethora of springs from other machines and gadgets I had dismantled. After trying a few different materials for the flowers heads, I found the best media to be the often colourful plastics from soap bottles and the like (that i had already been cutting up to make guitar picks from!). Happily, as a side note, since beginning this lovely journey, my second hand button collection has also blossomed!
some of the flowers pictured below, plus a plethora of others can be purchased from visitors in saint john, nb.
Some of the flower sculptures are quite special to me, like this one I made after my mother died in 2013. I asked the crematorium to give me her spare parts – morbid, perhaps… but when your mom’s two favourite sayings were ‘waste not, want not” and ‘it never hurts to ask’, you can’t not get someone to dig her old replacement hip out of the ashes, right? and so, with her titanium hip joint as the base and the lovely turquoise plastic containers hospitals issue for denture wearers, a few buttons from her collection, and a bag of used guitar strings from Tony’s Music Box (thanks guys) i made this bouquet the week after she died.
Thanks mom!
If you wanted to know more about my mother and her work, please click here