Studio Art Project 3 – Lost & Found
“Garden Sparkles” lampshade by Ginger Heidbreder, created from a discarded, disintigrating handbag
7” x 8” x 8”, fabric on paper lampshade, October 2024
I was inspired by the Lucky Walker film, “Wasteland”, that told the story of how renowned artist Vik Muniz recontextualized trash and the people who lived and worked in the trash dumps of Sao Paolo Brazil, and transformed trash into art. The film shows how he successfully accomplished another of his goals with both his pieces and his process: he honored the people who were the subject and participants of the art by offering respect and showing their humanity and dignity. His art and his process helped transform the lives of people living and working in an extremely difficult environment, and provided new opportunities for them.
Our Studio Art assignment – to find a novel way of re-contextualizing trash – a discarded
item – isn’t as dramatic as the scale Vik Muniz’ work, but the assignment itself did cause me to think differently about discarded items, and how our culture throws away so many items that in other places would not be considered trash, and can, in fact, be transformed with a little creativity.
The item that I was assigned to re-contextualize was a discarded shoulder bag, that at first glance seemed to be a perfectly good bag that perhaps someone had just tired of. Upon closer inspection, however, it was very worn out, and when disassembled, the inner lining simply disintegrated. Several components were still usable, however.
The main component was the outer fabric – several 5”x6” rectangles of fabric pieced together checkerboard style. Each rectangle had a different paisley-type design with embellishments sewn or outlined in gold or silver thread and many sequins sewn on. The pieces were in various stages of disintegration… some usable and some too far gone. The fabric colors were burgundy, red, pink, and gray. The shoulder strap was also usable. It was a long narrow piece of black fabric folded around a long, narrow piece of sequined burgundy fabric.
The fabrics’ designs seemed to be Indian motifs, but I was unsuccessful in finding anything like them through internet search. The designs and embellishments seemed to be important to the original piece, so I decided those would be important to any recontextualization.
I wanted to give the new piece a purpose for being other than simply ‘art’. I wanted it to be functional art. It was serendipitous that the two people who I asked for ideas both had the same suggestion: recover a lampshade.
Many of the embellishments on the fabric were flower-like, so that was an immediate theme to begin with. By combining different pieces from the different fabrics, and using a little imagination, other images from nature emerged – a butterfly, a snail, a long vine. I learned online how to make 3-dimensional flowers using small pieces of the fabric, and in the center of these flowers, I used the threads that held the purse together to create the flowers’ centers.
Critique by classmates suggested that the lampshade would look better if the white were completely covered. I agreed, but there was not enough usable fabric to do so. Instead, I painted the shade light gray with lighter gray swirls, in an attempt to create a cloudlike appearance, then applied my newly transformed embellishments. I tried to place the embellishments according to color, size and shape to create a balanced panorama of flowers and creatures, and I think I was mostly successful with this.
Something that I would have done differently, had I known that I would be painting the lampshade, is that I would have applied the trim along the top and bottom edge of the shade AFTER I painted it rather than BEFORE. I didn’t know at the time I applied the trim that painting the shade would be a good idea.
The final result is cheerful and fun, and added life to a boring, generic, white desk lamp picked up at Goodwill. The lamp/lampshade is not my style, but it looks like something that a little girl or tween might want on their desk or bedside table in their pink bedroom.
My Studio Art Project 3 “Lost & Found” assignment was to create something new from a discarded item. I was given a colorful but disintegrating purse. I used salvagable components of the purse fabric to create embellishments to turn a boring white lampshade into a colorful, sparkling garden. Here are other views of the new creation, and of steps along the way:
