Found Objects

Many of today's sculptors feel that the world is too full of things and that they do not wish to add to the clutter.Instead they choose to recycle the mass of material encountered in daily life, bestowing new life on things that others have discarded or abandoned.Working with reprocessed rubbish often points to the voracious and endless cycles of production, consumption and rejection in the world today.Artists compulsively accumulate material of every kind ranging from plastic bags to soft toys and discarded rubber tyres and recycled plastic bottle crates.

Most of the material that the artists collect for recycling is found within a close radius of their studio although some collect similar materials from disparate parts of the world and exhibit them together revealing how depressingly uniform many aspects of our modern world have become. A handful of artists choose to live on site while collecting their hoards and recreate the work anew making site specific installations.Most of the items collected are man made but a handful of artists such as Lauren Berkowitz and Simryn Gill use natural materials that are subject to entropy and decay.

Lauren Berkowitz's installation using red chillies

Jac Leirner creates mixed media sculptures and installations using commonplace objects, collections of which have been fastidiously hoarded by the artist for years at a time. Her compulsive accumulation commonly focuses on items deemed insignificant or lacking value: plastic shopping bags, cigarette boxes, airline boarding passes and airsickness bags—all of which are designed to be disposed of after their use. Leirner’s works are deft and pragmatic representations of the continual exchange of ideas, information, money, and commercial commodities between nations and individuals.

Leirner’s ideas are inherently Duchampian in her usage of banal materials, yet she breaks from the Dadaist model by infusing the objects with a sense of culture and history. These items are no longer generic and mass-produced, but recontextualized as relics of Leirner’s own journeys. While Duchamp often eschewed the original function and context of his objects, for Leirner the items’ original symbolism is vital and marks— both visually and temporally—the artist’s autobiographical experience.

While personal, Leirner’s choice of material also reflects common experiences and possessions: her cigarette pack is like yours, as are the collections of business cards and shopping bags. Critics have often described her work as “poetic” due to the nostalgic nature of the collections, as well as the whimsical and romantic notion of travel that is evoked. 

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Jac Leiner's sculpture using Marlboro cigarette packs collected from cigarettes she had used over 3 years

S Some sculptors work in the manner of a social historian or investigative reporter, sorting through agglomerations of objects in order to re-establish new and imaginative arrangements which often have a distinct narrative content.Others work in a more formal manner highlighting basic sculptural issues such as density, mass,colour ,scale, balance.There are varied and nuanced approaches to accumulation stacking,heaping,layering, taping, hanging.Arrangements can be scattered and chaotic or coolly organized in a grid formation.

Using found objects to preserve memories:To create the installation Number 80, Leonardo Drew collected over four hundred common objects— toys, furniture, appliances, and household wares—from thrift stores, junkyards, and off the street. With a large group of interns and staff, he cast each object in paper, removing the original object once the paper cast was created. They are hollow, nearly weightless forms that echo the original objects from which they were made more than they replicate them. Instead of presenting the ongoing and transformed life of discarded objects, the installation takes us beyond the life of the object itself and portrays the ethereal essence of things that once existed.

Leonardo Drew's cast paper found objects