For Australian Artist Johnsen, Trash is a Treasure

Everyone who has ever walked a beach somewhere has encountered a plastic bottle that someone has carelessly left in the sand.

For Australian artist John Dahlsen, that experience was what inspired him to become an artist whose works are made of other people’s trash.

Dahlsen recently told an interviewer that he could not disregard what he said were “the environmental messages inherent in the use of this kind of medium.”

Big words, but the point is simple: make people think about what they’re throwing away, how it can be used even to create beautiful art.

There are no art critics at Earth Preservers, but Dahlsen’s seven towers made from plastic found on Australian beaches – see image with this story – look pretty cool to us.

To learn more, read the Harbor Arts article.

And go to Dahlsen’s website.

This is Bonkers – a Shoe Made From Recycled Cell Phone Parts?!

Earth Preservers has seen a lot of great eco-art made by students using recycled parts and materials. But this sneaker made from recycled cell-phone parts may be the best we’ve ever seen (so far).

Just look at it. As captured by a photographer from the Tampa Bay Times in Florida, it really does look like a regular sneaker – until you look closely and see that every piece looks kind of metallic.

 If anybody at Nike or Reebok is reading this story, they really should test the sneaker’s look with a group of young people. We wouldn’t be surprised if a real sneaker that looks like it was made from recycled cell-phone parts was very popular.

To learn more, read the Tampa Bay Times story.

Students Use All of Nature To Create Works of Art

As high school art students, their assignment was to create a work of eco-art. For their materials, they had all of nature to work from.

In other words, their assignment was to create “Earth Art.”

One group used a camera and lighting to “pose” giant rocks. Another did the same with a small pond bordered by tall growth. Another found space that looked the prairie of the Indians who used to inhabit the area, then fashioned tall wooden poles lying on the ground into a Tipi.

If your class is looking for a project that’ll get you outdoors, why not create works of Earth Art?

To learn more, read this All Things Art & Ed article.

Sending an Artistic Message about Water Used to Make Blue Jeans

Ever heard the expression “A picture is worth a thousand words”?

Well, environmentalists have used thousands upon thousands of words to complain about how much water it can take to make any number of consumer products, such as blue jeans and paper.

But this one work of art, by an organization called Bloo Nation, seems to express the problem better than any words can.

According to CNN, which first ran this image of what Bloo Nation calls “The Waving Wall,” this work of street art is made of empty plastic water bottles. The number of water bottles in the Waving Wall represents the number that some manufacturers use to make a single pair of blue jeans.

It Costs Nothing to Make Great Eco-Art

Look at this picture. It accompanied a recent news story from Alabama, published by Gulf Coast Newspapers.

What do you see? We see a great example of eco-art that costs nothing to make.

The kids were part of an after-school arts program. The project they were working on was called “land-environmental art.”

It looks to us like the kids used whatever they found lying on the ground, plus their imaginations, to turn a patch of land into a canvas on which they laid out a work of “eco-art.”

Pretty simple, right? What can your imagination come up with?

To read the Gulf Coast Newspapers story.