I’m drowning. Drowning in ‘stuff’. I am taking in found objects faster than I can use them. I hate to see things go to waste and I know I could use these items for something whether it be visual art, functional art, etc. But sometimes you have to let things go.

It was getting out of hand. My 1.5 car garage was over-flowing with scrap wood, cassette tapes, miscellaneous hardware, old windows, gallons and gallons of people’s unwanted paint,…you get the picture. I had to cut some of my losses on items I’ve had around for a while but could never find the right thing to use them for.

That’s where the scrap yard comes in. I was able to take a whole bunch of scrap metal to the scrap yard which helped a lot on space. I also recently built a table for our kitchen out of old red oak ‘horse fence’ board from a place in Zionsville. I also used up most of the cedar fencing for raised garden beds this summer and will continue to use the rest of it up this fall. We plan to expand our garden and the fence board definitely will come in handy. Good thing I saw them before my neighbor was going to take them to the trash drop off.

“Fragmented” 2010 – Scrap Elm wood

Onto these photos..This piece, “Fragmented”, is made out of scrap elm wood that originally came from an old barn. I can’t remember where the barn was located. My old employer took old barn wood and turned it into flooring, furniture, etc. These were some of the flooring scraps that he couldn’t use but of course, I sure as hell could use them.

This piece is pretty big measuring in at 58″ x 54″ and weighs just as much. It weighs so much that after my wife and I hung it up the first time, it ripped the hardware out of the wall. Luckily the piece was still intact. It was the classic ‘fly landing on an unstable stack of objects then triggering them to fall’. If that makes sense…you know, like good ol’ fashion cartoons. I was just in the middle of telling Rachel to be careful not to bump into it and just as I gently put my finger on it, “Fragmented” came crashing down. Luckily, not into more fragments than originally intended.

I wanted this piece to look like it was floating off the wall. The way I approached doing that was having all the support ‘beams’ hidden. I used old cedar lattice from the above mentioned fence panels. It looks like a deranged labyrinth from the back. I then used scrap pieces of 2×4′s to set it off of the wall. In doing this, it creates a nice shadow and gives it the effect of floating off the wall.

I am really pleased with the way “Fragmented” turned out and it’s nice to look at that instead of an awful painting I did from 2005.

Next is a speaker I built from……you guessed it! Scrap wood! I had the speakers lying around and wanted to put them to use. They actually came from the speaker cabinet I used in “I Like My Music Well Done”. I built this new cabinet out of MDF and then glued different pieces of wood to the front. Nothing was painted or stained. Those pieces just came from different sources and I picked them out to fit a certain color palette. Now that I look back, it almost looks like a Jim Houser rip-off. I love his work and maybe his color palette was hiding somewhere in my brain and came out for this one. I have more speakers lying around so I’m sure there will be more built in the future.

This last one is a wall storage cabinet that I built recently. I can’t remember how I got this guy’s number but I ended up getting some great white oak, poplar, etc. scraps from him. The wood panel for “Built On A Basin” came from him as well. I believe it’s white oak but who knows…it could be maple for all I know. I’ve never really been good at identifying different species of tree. I found the metal at a flea market in Danville last fall. I then used old bike brake pads for the handles. As you can see, the door just slides out of a slot cut on the right side. This cabinet is 19″ x 8″ x 9″. I now have a place to store all my usb cables for my cameras, ipod, etc. It also gives me more places to put plants and photos of my awesome son J.J.

On the visual art front, I am currently working on a few pieces. They are in the very early stages. We are in the middle of remodeling our bathroom and after laying tile, there is always leftover mortar. I hate to see it just thrown in the trash so I’ve used the mortar in the latest pieces. One of them is on cement board and I think when it’s done it is going to be heavy. I might add another panel to it and make it my largest piece yet. There is something satisfying about creating art on such a large scale. Especially when most of my work is on the smaller side.

I am also getting back into circuit bending, building my own unique instruments/noise makers for J.J. and I to mess around with. I also have plans to build a super simple pinhole camera for some Polaroid film I picked up at goodwill. There seems to be so much I want to try out and experiment with. I guess it’s only a matter of time before it all happens.

Thanks for checking out this long winded blog post. I feel I had to make up for the lack of posts these past months. I plan to start adding video updates to this site as well to give you a peak into my creative space and see my works in progress. Thanks again and feel free to share the link with your friends and family. Maybe your mother’s brother’s uncle’s stepdaughter’s cat’s best friend would really enjoy my work…

Tags: cabinet, Jim Houser, nathan monk, reclaimed wood, recycling, reusing, scrap wood, speaker

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