My good friend Maureen (a real artist!) suggested that I submit a piece to a local juried art show called "ReMade". Obviously something reclaimed, reused or repurposed. I looked around the house and the most abundant and obvious recyclable material was the New York Times. We get the 7 day discounted Faculty/Professor subscription and the blasted thing covers every horizontal surface of the house.
I grabbed a stack of papers and headed out to the studio and sat, and looked, and stared, and folded, and finally, I chopped and spiraled. I kept wrapping the strips of paper around and around itself and the wheel kept getting bigger. I realized I was making a tree ring. I was returning that paper back from whence it came. Home to the mother tree. I wrapped that first ring with some bark I ripped off a fallen log from our back yard. The piece in this pic is comprised of an entire week of the NYT. I marked each day by orienting the margin strips to make a white ring, and then tagged each day with an environmental headline found from within the pages of that days paper.
This piece got in the show, and now I just keep making tree rings.
