Art from Artifacts

How do we transform old elements into new elements and leftovers into fresh creations? Today I offer you several loosely connected notes about a sort of creative alchemy that’s occupied much of my reflection over the last couple of years: art from artifacts.

Brick by brick, box by box,
we construct the architecture of
tomorrow from today.
Past is just blue’s blueprint.

— Alison C. Rollins(Source: “Hymn of Inscape” in Black Bell)

Old, disused, detritus and vestiges revitalized. The abandoned adapted. Refuse recycled and upcycled. Forgotten and neglected ingredients reimagined as unfamiliar confections.

Drawn on the spot or after the event from memory, the images are but vestiges of the original moment. Like life itself; as time passes and we deteriorate clarity grows.

Art born from decomposition.

We are connected to new moments by the clarity of the vanished.

— Kevin Raines, field notes, August 20, 2012

Composing from decomposed elements! Kevin Raines’s notebook’s are an uncensored glimpse into his uniquely creative mind’s process, wonders, and aspirations.

What are we creating when we create, when we write, when we tell a story, when we artistically alchemize artifacts into artwork? (Source: Creator & Creation)

We are rehabilitating today into tomorrow, the past into the future. We are creating and re-creating from the enduring leftovers, the compost, the echoes of what has gone before.

Found artifacts. Found art. Found stories. Found poetry… Art from artifacts…

(Source: A Lure Allure )

Distilling the enduring, the durable from the decomposing, the vanishing.

Indeed, something endures, but rarely should we be confident that we know the past as it was. As it once was. We are informed, and perhaps sometimes misinformed, by our perspective some time subsequent to the archival echo upon which we fixate. And yet, perhaps allowing for reimagination, adaptive reuse, and even ahistoric reinvention, drawing upon the artifacts and memories we inherit but investing them with whimsy and wonder is one of the best ways to rehabilitate the past. Art from artifacts…

(Source: The Past Lives On)

Wonder. Awe. Curiosity. A jigger of carefreedom. But how much caprice is too much?

I remember visiting an old home, the original Rock Harbor homestead, decades ago. I was a boy. My parents had not yet sold Homeport, not yet built a home in a treelined meadow near Lake Champlain, halfway between Essex and Westport. I was young and easily fascinated, easily mesmerized. (Susan might say this is still the case.) While visiting the old home with my parents and the property’s new owner, I learned that it had been inhabited for a period in the 1960s, perhaps even the early 1970s, by hippy holdovers who had allowed the house to fall into disrepair. But even more notable to me was the fact that many of the bedrooms upstairs had decorated with graffiti. Words and images layered onto the walls with disregard. Even then it felt disrespectful. As if the home had somehow been violated and soiled. There was something disturbing about what *must* have been creative, even artistic in the eyes of the graffiti painter(s).

We were visiting the house as a thorough renovation was beginning. Within a couple of years I saw these room again, and they were restored. Charming. Probably not unlike the way they’d been originally built and decorated.

There are subtler examples for another day, perhaps…