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Artist Sara Sullivan looking for recycled materials
Wed 27 Apr 2011
Sara Sullivan - www.stickandstone.co.uk
I am an artist that works in recycled
materials, and for 10 years I have worked with The Devon Guild of Craftsmen as
an artist in schools. I am constantly on the look out for old paddling pools, li-lo's and
plastics for art. I can re-use these by cutting them into strips with strong
scissors and rag-rugging or weaving them. I have an internet site www.stickandstone.co.uk, where you can see some of the projects I have
run in schools, including the building of a 9ft bee in a primary school in
Sidmouth ( a commission after the school saw the huge recycled bee at the Eden
Project) and a woven plastic landscape and Pippi Longstocking at St.Michaels
Primary in Kingsteignton. Recent projects have included Wacky Wizard of Oz
flowers made in All Saints Academy, Plymouth in March 2011 and in April I will
be making beautiful plastic butterflies in Wynstream Primary on Burnthouse Lane
in Exeter. If you can donate some bright flexible plastics to my cause I will
guarantee that they are put to good use. Re-using them is better than putting
them in the ground!
Recently I have had an urge to make a
couple of pieces about trade and industrialization. These would be re-makings
of commonplace household items, one being a persian carpet with the pattern of
the garden of Eden on it, and another being The Willow Pattern plate which
features a different luscious garden on it. All the features on the plate have
a meaning, and as a child I can remember being told the story of the plate by
my paternal grand-mother. It is a story of a girl who lived in the garden and
the gardener she fell in love with. Her father was a Mandarin and lived in the
Pagoda. He finds out that his daughter wants to be with a man of low class, and
in his disgust he banishs the gardener
and builds a high fence around the garden to keep him out. There are a few
different versions of the tale but in the one I heard, her father has already
promised her hand in marriage to an accountant, so he locks her up in a smaller
pagoda in the garden – to keep her in. On the day of her wedding the girl’s
lover appears and runs away with her (stealing the dowry at the same time) and
you can see them crossing the bridge with the Mandarin in hot pursuit. (I
thought they looked like walking fish when I was a child! Maybe they were all
wearing tight Kimonos, so even hot pursuit was a fairly sedate activity.)
Anyway the lovers escape but usually the story ends badly. The Mandarin spends
the rest of his natural tracking them down, the garden goes to wrack and ruin,
the lovers are caught, brought back home on a boat and put to death. However
they cannot be parted, so that even in death their souls seek one another out
and are reincarnated as turtle doves.
The Willow Pattern Plate is an interesting artefact for other reasons.
The mass production of the plate is a story of the industrial revolution and as
such it says something about economics and how we came to live in cities. Here
we have an item that everyone is familiar with, but the very fact that it is so
familiar is a sign of its mass production. This makes it an indicator of people’s lives becoming removed from the land and environment. I am
interested in this plate for what it represents as well as the half remembered
childhood stories. For me the fact that it depicts a garden adds to the resonance of its meanings, in that I would be
recreating a garden with plastics that
would normally shoved the ground. I want to make a large wall hanging - perhaps
10ft x 6ft - that is made from layers of plastics and plastic woven into
chicken wire. I need to collect some coloured plastics before I start on these
projects. If you are throwing any away you could call me first and I might be
able to collect or otherwise
my studio is at Higher Brookfield in Lustleigh, just off the Moretonhampstead
to Bovey Rd. Tel Sara 01647 277586
I
can also re-use semi rigid corrugated plastic signs and feed sacks, but if
possible could they be (relatively) clean. Thankyou very much!
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