Junk

Epiphany – I like junk.

Actually, I don’t just ‘like’ junk. I love it.

This is not news to people who know me. It’s not really news to me either, but it occurred to me while stuck in traffic on the way to the quack the other day, that I really, really love junk.

Okay; a disclaimer here and get your mind right out of the gutter. I am only mildly interested in the euphemistic junk. And another disclaimer – being that most of my life has had to be controlled medicinally, I do not like illicit substances also known as junk, not even alcohol. But I do so LOVE actual junk.

In the car, I surmised that my ideal job could be sorting through a tip shop. Not an OpShop though. They’re far too domestic, too routine, and I’m not sure Op Shop people are my kind of people. But a tip shop? The utter randomness of other people’s rubbish holds a mystical allure for me.

As a kid, I LOVED the book Stig of the Dump by Clive King, a book about a young boy who discovers a ‘caveman’ living in an old clay pit filled with rubbish. I am also my father’s daughter – Dad being a veritable magpie, quite possibly because he grew up in the Depression and through times where ‘waste not, want not’ was a necessity and not just a saying.

Recently, while I’ve walked around my home during renovations, and after workers had left for the day, I could not prevent myself from collecting discarded nails and screws and interesting pieces of off-cut wood because of the feeling that they might come in handy. While the random clean up is probably a wise thing for me to do (as I am likely at any time of the day, night, or year to be walking around bare foot), it is also an extension of my feeling that things discarded by others because they consider them to be at the end of their usefulness have a little more they can give to me.

ANNE COULD MAKE SOMETHING WITH THAT is something my friends joke about me. These mildly famous words were uttered by my BFF when we were having a cuppa one day and one of my fillings fell out. And again a few days later when another fell out. “Look, a pair of earrings right there!”

On a more serious note, I do find it distressing in our modern world that there is so much waste. We have come a long way with recycling programs, I know, but I worked for a trucking logistics company over a decade ago and overheard one of the directors telling his people that a convoy of recycling trucks was heading to landfill because recycling systems could not keep up with the amount of stuff being put out for collection. To everyone who feels they are doing their bit by faithfully recycling, that is not the convenient end to it! But even though I hope this situation has improved, I don’t have complete faith that it has.

So, I am always looking for a way to give something usually destined for landfill another go at existing in daylight. One of my early attempts was a spider in a web made from an old domestic telemetry device I’d pulled apart out of curiosity. I soldered the wires, screws and chips together inexpertly and it hung in my garden for quite a few years, reminding me to keep trying.

Then I stumbled onto my CFT flowers (cat food tin flowers) which I’ve had a fair bit of success with, making one year’s Christmas tree out of these (and eventually demolishing it a couple of years later much to the annoyance of the eight-legged wildlife that had taken up residence in among the sharp petals). We go through a lot of cat food tins in this house. And I have a 50-litre tub full of flowers awaiting paint, but that’s another story about creativity going hand in hand with procrastination.

What about all those plastic soft drink bottles? Not a lot of that gets consumed here but I have my sources for these arty materials, and I’ve been making these plastic bottles into handy little hanging herb gardens. They’re a work in progress, I confess. Some plants like growing in the bottles better than others, but I am always trying out new arrangements and different seeds. We’ll get there!

A success story, in my humble opinion, was my Trampergola. Its creation served quite a few purposes. I bought my daughter a trampoline for Christmas years back. She has autism and I thought having a place to bounce would help her with an exercise regime and a joyful place to burn off some of that energy. She jumped on it maybe three or four times, then we used it for awhile to lie on and look at the clouds, searching for cloud shapes and making up stories. Over the course of a year it was hardly used at all, until it became a white elephant taking up space in our backyard. One thing about my daughter is once you ‘have’ something, you cannot get rid of it … and frankly, people seldom wish to buy a secondhand trampoline. It wasn’t being used and I was not allowed to dispose of it. In addition, we live in a small house and had no back porch or sheltered area outside. So, the best solution at the time was for the trampoline to go ‘up’.

The pillars it sat on were old tyres given to me by the local auto tyre place. They were happy to get rid of them, and the tyres made great planters. Eventually, the roses, echium, tree dahlias, and other plants grew from those pillars right up over the top making a wonderful, leafy roof. Underneath was lovely and shaded in the hot summer and occasionally I could run the hose over the roof to make it even cooler. It lasted for ten years and just recently I dismantled it to make way for those renovations I mentioned earlier. The tyres though have been kept in service as planters around the backyard. They do a great job (although not recommended for edible plants).

There are quite a few other advantages of making art out of junk. High on the list is that there is a never-ending supply of materials, and it is usually cheap or free. Another, for me at least, is that the item can suggest the nature of creation. “I could make something with that” pops into my head and my mind begins to turn over the shape of the item, the material it’s made from, and what meaning can be derived from its original use. There could be a statement made, or it could just be a pleasing, pretty presentation.

So yes, I think a tip shop would be a wonderful place to work … although I do wonder how much I would end up spending there and how much junk would come home with me at the end of each day!