The Unstoppable Force

It's amazing and perfect, how seemingly small thoughts or experiences can explode into an avalanche of ideas. Sometimes they are things that you don't really remember noticing because they didn't seem important at the time. They are like sleeper ideas waiting for some fertile context to arise. They can take many years to incubate and develop.

Even though Bellingham, WA is a pretty small town, it has a circumstance that allows it to be some what unique. Other than some small farming communities, Bellingham is the last town on the I-5 before entering Canada. So, while living on the streets there in my early teen years, I noticed that it seemed to have a lot more wingnuts, freaks and transients than made sense for a place of it's size. I wasn't alone in this perception. There would be rumors and theories floating around as to why this was. "something in the water", " an old indian curse" or "a mental hospital had shut down in the 80's, letting all of it's patients out into the streets" were just a few. I don't know what truth to any of them there is. I think that really, it's just a kind of dead end, being the last stop on the freeway and railroad, before hitting the border. That's why my family had ended up there. We were trying to move to Alaska and ran out of gas money. After finding work, my parents decided to just stay and I'm sure this was the case for a lot of destitute and sometimes mentally unstable travelers. Hanging out downtown and getting high as a teenager, I can't count how many strange and interesting characters I met.

One of them was a crack head from LA, that had somehow hitchhiked up the coast. Although, I couldn't picture how he got anyone to pick him up. He was barefoot, dirty and wore a pair of tattered cut off shorts and he didn't talk. The thing that stuck out in my memory about this guy was that he had bracelets and anklets that he had braided together out of tattered stringy pieces of plastic garbage and shopping bags.

This memory has been floating around in my head for years. Recently, while thinking about some 3 dimensional art ideas, I remembered this and began thinking I'd like to make things out of garbage and specifically plastic bags. I'd been collecting little trinkets and metal pieces for quite awhile. But didn't really know what the application for them would be. As this idea was developing, I took a vacation to Portland, OR. I saw examples of similar things, at the Portland Craft Museum and Saturday Market. The ideas were developing momentum and I was so excited about it, that I would pick up pieces of plastic, caution tape and other things while walking around. I couldn't wait to get back home to really get to work on these ideas. I had an old piece of composite wool padding from a box spring mattress, the kind that looks like it's recycled from little shreds of other discarded fabrics. I cut it into four pieces to use as a background for a serious of recycled garbage art wall hangings. Paintings made up of these found objects and materials rather than paint. Each of the four pieces will have their own color scheme and character.

While working on those four pieces, I started cutting the garbage bags into strips and braiding them together. After braiding for a couple of weeks, it dawned on me how to actually weave the separate braids together to make a belt. Today, while weaving the belt, I decided I also wanted to make a choker and a curtain for the window I put into the studio here.

So this guy that society would generally never imagine could inspire anything, gave me an idea that fifteen years later, as if a switch had been flipped on, would become active and fuse with other ideas. Most of which along the way, also seemed insignificant. The man made world we live in is made up of all of these tiny ideas floating, mingling and evolving over time. This ties into the study of memes. For example, an idea of how to enhance military communication evolved into the Internet that has transformed civilization globally and some minor observation on how a gecko's feet sticking to a wall could be studied and mimicked in other applications. There are many more examples but the point is, in the realm of ideas it is naive to think that you can define the point where any one of them begins or ends. If something is interesting to you then that is the perfect reason to explore it, there is no telling where it could lead and who it could inspire.. Because, they all put their little contribution into the perpetual transformation of the world we live in.

NAC/apm