Nothing Is Wasted: The Art of Aurora Robson
by: Phillip Barcio on November 25th, 2009 | 3 Comments »
“The forms in my work are derivative of nightmares I had when I was a child. My fodder is junk mail, litter, waste, and nightmares. My job is to transform these things into art.” — Aurora Robson
When something terrible happens, it might someday somehow be transformed into something less terrible — this is the personal belief to which I most stubbornly cling.
This isn’t idealism. It’s alchemy, the transformation of something of no value or little value into something useful, something beautiful.
Honeybees are alchemists. Sewage plant workers are alchemists. Anyone who has ever picked up litter, watered a seed, raised a child, started a business, or strung words together into a meaningful sentence is an alchemist.
It is in that core of my basic optimistic nature, in that tiny place where I believe alchemy is true, that I am beholden to the creations of artist Aurora Robson.
Robson’s dynamic, flowing installations and sculptures are constructed from discarded plastic bottles reclaimed from the wastebasket of America’s streets.
(To see more of Aurora Robson’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.)
Says Robson:
Without intervention, used plastic bottles have basically two options: becoming landfill, or maybe getting recycled. In the past year I have intercepted approximately 30,000 bottles from the waste stream, turning them into art instead of allowing them to go into landfill, our oceans, or the environmentally costly recycling process.
Robson’s plastic sculptures combine scientific complexity with a sensual, organic curvaceousness, eliciting images of fantastical biomechanical DNA strands, atomic building blocks of some unholy progeny of Mother Nature and the petrochemical industry.
But instead of frightening me, this strange offspring fills me with a curious peace of mind. The trash that is destroying the ecosystem we know is simultaneously participating in the manifestation of an oddly beautiful ecosystem to come.
I feel less naïve for believing that human activity and industry might yet lead to something enduring, transcendent, and safe.
Continuing in this vein are Robson’s elaborate collages constructed from the junk mail that comes to her mailbox.
Says Robson:
I have transformed the activity of opening up the mail and finding a depressing mass of garbage and credit card applications into a pleasant experience wherein I am able to discover new batches of art supplies.
My Practice is essentially about recognizing and embracing new possibilities while encouraging others to do the same.
This work is a cure for a sickness I have had for a long time. Aurora’s plastic sculptures tell me the natural landscape and ecosystem of the near future may not look the way I hoped it would. It may be unrecognizable to my current way of seeing. But it might still be artful and beautiful. And to future life-forms born into its strangeness, it might even feel like home.
(To see more of Aurora Robson’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery, or visit her website.)
These pieces are amazing. Check out the full gallery of Robson’s work.
Aurora is definitely living up to her name as she ushers in the “dawn” of ecological art! And just the other day I read about an architect who is building homes from recycled auto and truck tires stuffed wiith earth as he builds discarded bottles into the walls for light. Not to mention another recent national news item about a contractor who builds homes from leftover and discarded building materials. These are the practical approaches to recycling. Aurora is introducing art lovers to its esthetic possibilities. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that it won’t be too many more years before entrepeneurs began fighting for the rights to the world’s trash.
Thanks again, Phil, for keeping your readers abreast of the best!
Aurora’s work is terrific, and her brilliant reclamation of trash is, as Phil writes, heartening. It was her exuberant oil paintings that first turned me on, however, when I came upon her work in a group show last year. As I wrote (and quoted) then:
“Standing with the painting, I recalled something I’d recently read in Harper’s Magazine. The following text is excerpted from “The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions,” by David Berlinksi.*
“‘Faith’ it is said in Hebrews 11:1, ‘is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’…If religious belief places the human heart in the service of an unseen world, the serious sciences have since the great revolution of the seventeenth century done precisely the same thing….
The universe in its largest aspect is the expression of curved space and time. Four fundamental forces hold sway. There are black holes and various infernal singularities. Particles pop out of quantum fields. Elementary particles appear either as bosons or fermions. The fermions are divided into quarks and leptons. Quarks come in six varieties, but they are never seen, confined as they are within hadrons by a force that perversely grows weaker at short distances and stronger at distances that are long. There are six leptons in four varieties. Depending on just how things counted, matter has as its fundamental constituents twenty-four elementary particles, together with a great many fields, symmetries, strange geometrical spaces, and forces that are disconnected at one level of energy and fused at another, as well as at least a dozen different forms of energy, all of them active.
This is not an ontology that puts one in mind of a longshoreman’s view of the material world. It is remarkably baroque, and it is promiscuously catholic.”
Such baroque catholicism is the stuff of theoretical science, but it is also the stuff of good art.”
And Aurora’s work is very good art.
(*) David Berlinski is a proponent of Intelligent Design. Still, I see no reason to dismiss all of his ideas because we disagree with specifics.