Create Craft
12 Incredible Activists Using Recycled Materials in Their Art
Artists have a good social and ecological influence by spreading awareness of the pollution catastrophe and consumerism culture like a “phoenix out of the trash.”
Worldwide resistance is being sparked by environmental destruction. Mass demonstrations are one way it might manifest itself, but art is another. In the end, we are all pleading with our leaders to address the social and environmental crises.
Unprecedented are all the peaceful protestors who are leading the charge in the most nonviolent type of revolution. They are expressing their desperation and a critique of the culture through their work. Is a new generation of artists being produced as a result of pollution?
Here are some extremely intriguing artists encouraging the use of recycled materials in their works, including scrap metal, recycled floppy discs, vintage cassettes, plastic gathered from the oceans, post-consumer textiles, and even toys. Decide for yourself!
1. Barefooted Welder / Scrap metal sculptor from Australia
The freestyle attitude of Barefooted Welder infuses the metal art sculpture with a fresh cultural storm. His menacing animals, some life-size and sometimes with enormous dimensions, roar to overwhelm with their fierce personalities.
Micky D., an artist, travels barefoot across dumps, trash cans, and secret locations that were intended to be natural areas. There are numerous valuable materials as greenery weaves its way through the breathtaking environment. One of the most difficult phases is collecting trash because recycling is already expensive and time-consuming, especially with heavy materials like metal.
Over 7 Tonnes of scrap metal, including steel, copper, and aluminium, have been gathered by the Barefooted Welder since 2015. Heavy metals leak and poison the soil and water system, having detrimental impacts on both the environment and human health. The artwork attempts to preserve the memory of the Australia of the past while bringing attention to this occurrence.Find Barefooted Welder in his North Queensland shed throwing sparks and transforming the tenacity of scrap metal into breathtaking beauty.
2. HA Schult | Sculptures made out of garbage
German conceptual artist HA Schult is well recognised for his work with waste and his object and performance art. His most well-known creations include the travelling show Trash People, which was on display on every continent, and the Save The Beach hotel, a structure composed entirely of trash.
Schult makes occurrences in addition to Pop Art-style pieces, drawing inspiration from commercial advertising and a critique of consumerism. The artist calls himself an avid supporter of the “new ecological consciousness” and was dubbed a “eco-art pioneer” by the Washington Post.
Using sights he has seen, HA Schult has succeeded in raising the public’s consciousness for decades. He sets up subjects in public areas that are often closed off to the general public. His artwork makes a stinging commentary on the luxurious parts of western civilization and is always clearly tied to the region where it is shown. He continually returns to the metaphor of trash, dumps, and detritus to draw attention to our own ostentatious spending.
3. Robert Bradford | Sculptures made out of recycled toys
This artist uses discarded plastic toys, as well as other colourful plastic bits and pieces like combs and buttons, brushes, and pieces of clothes pegs, to create life-size and larger-than-life sculptures of people and animals. Up to 3,000 pieces of toys were incorporated into some of the sculptures, preventing their disposal in landfills.
His innovative artistic process began with the notion that the abandoned toys of his children might be a component of something greater. Bradford claims he enjoys the notion that the plastic components have a history, albeit an unknowable one, and that they also transmit ‘cultural’ history because each piece symbolises a specific period of time. The inventive sculptures are bursting with colour, humour, and good vibes.Private galleries, organisations, and museums all around the world acquire his recycled artwork. Robert is content to use his clients’ objects and include their personal toys in his commissioned works. Robert currently resides in Herne Bay, Kent.
4. Steven Rodrig | PCB sculptures using discarded electronics
Steven Rodrig is a creative artist who repurposes used circuit boards and electronic components to create astonishing works of art that are both organic and mechanical. Strangely enough, despite having a degree in structural mechanics rather than the arts, he ultimately found his calling through the creation of his distinctive PCB sculptures, which employ a material that was never intended to be a component of a sculpture.
He gathers used PCs, VCRs, radios, cell phones, and other devices with recyclable PCBs. Others, including diodes, transistors, and capacitors, aid the artist in creating the oddly organic appearance of his sculptures. Unparalleled mechanical beauty is added by the PCB.
In order to control the PCBs, the artist overcame his own obstacles by creating new, specialised tools and utilising technology in unusual ways. His artwork aims to raise awareness of the fact that technology is developing quickly and that new PCB generations are being manufactured, rendering older designs obsolete. The artist wants to encourage everyone to recycle by highlighting hidden beauty in the electrical parts we discard that would otherwise wind up in a pile of outdated junk doomed to deteriorate over time. Please get in touch with the artist if you want to donate!
5. Guerra de la Paz | Sculptures made of recycled clothes
Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz established the Cuban artistic group known as Guerra de la Paz. They are based in Miami, Florida, and use unusual materials to make their vibrant sculptures, such as repurposed clothing.
While examining topics with cultural and historical value, the artists draw inspiration from the familiarity of ready-made objects, whose archaeological features and encapsulated energies evoke the significance of the human footprint and convey psychosocial and environmental signals.Their works usually interpret well-known works of art and frequently express strongly political implications. The contemporary consumer society and the way we carelessly utilise and toss out items like clothing that are still in fine condition are topics of discussion in Guerra de la Paz’s art.
6. Nick Gentry | Portraits made of recycled media
Nick Gentry is a London-based artist known for using recycled materials to create his stunningly futuristic portraits, including old film rolls, VHS discs, vinyl record sleeves, and x-rays (the predecessor to the USB drive).
The environmental artists also foster a dialogue between analogue and digital techniques. Although these items are no longer in the spotlight, by briefly picturing them there, it is possible to better understand the speed and scope of the changes that are occurring right now.
The advancement of consumerism, technology, and cyberculture in our society has an impact on his creative output. He thinks “contributor, artist, and viewer come closer together” as a result of the utilisation of repurposed media artefacts. In a wholly collaborative “social art” endeavour, the materials are ethically and sustainably gathered directly from members of the public. Every new piece of art begins with an open working method, which enables recycled reflections of modern society to emerge from shared history.
7. Jason Mercier | Celebrity collages made with their own waste
Jason Mecier, a San Francisco-based artist, uses everything from broken pieces of jewellery to empty deodorant cans and bubblegum wrappers to make pictures of celebrities. He has collected trash over the course of 15 years, meticulously utilising it in his stunning contemporary artwork.
Mercier is an expert in creating absurd mosaic pictures of celebrities from their own abandoned items. Donald Trump and Mariah Carey definitely threw away things, but Hello Kitty surely didn’t. He expertly creates anyone out of anything, including Honey Boo Boo out of 25 pounds of rubbish and Kevin Bacon out of bacon. According to artist Jason Mecier, many famous people have purchased the pieces they were the inspiration for. He spends at least 50 hours on each of his inventions.
8. Derek Gores | Collages made of recycling magazines
Derek Gores recycles magazines, labels, data, and other random finding analogue and digital resources to make his wacky collage portraits on canvas.
Due to his passion in the natural beauty of figures and the brave spirit of play, the artist has attracted national notice for his artwork series. His works of art make use of unfinished, geometric, and raw materials that permit modern beauty while making reference to classical beauty. Instead than just painting a scene from an experience, the artist wants to capture the emotion of seeing the world through a child’s eyes, when everything is brand-new.His clients include Lenny Kravitz, U2, Adidas, Madonna, Harley Davidson, Nokia, and Sacramento. Recent journeys have taken his work to Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and Sacramento.
9. Erika Iris Simmons | Pop-art portraits made with old cassettes
Self-taught artist Erika Iris Simmons concentrates on using unusual, leftover, and donated materials to produce her works of art. She like the antiquated, and her main media are donated secondhand stuff.
She specialises in turning obsolete cassette recordings into very artistic images of famous people, in the hopes that not everything that has outlived its usefulness will be thrown away. The notion of using objects in novel ways appeals to the artist.Without using any paint or pigments, Simmons creates portraits of people related with the object she selects. The recycled artist makes use of items like old cassette recordings, wine labels, and sheet music. “It’s wonderful to deal with unusual, antiquated materials. Things with independent minds. nearly anything
10. Messy Msxi | Experiential artwork “Plastic Ocean”
Tan Zi Xi is an artist and illustrator whose works combine the horrors of ocean pollution with sarcastic, humorous humour. She was asked to participate in Imaginarium: Under the Water, Over the Sea in 2016 by the Singapore Art Museum. Children and adults may experience being submerged in a place covered in rubbish, imitating the environment of the “plastic pool,” as the artist replicated the Pacific Garbage Patch in real form.
The process of making “Plastic Ocean” was one of the artist’s most poignant memories because it was difficult in many ways. In addition to the laborious task of gathering, organising, and cleaning 26,000 pieces of used plastic for the installation, the procedure for receiving and discovering how. How much rubbish we create each day. “It will become clear just how unsustainable our culture of convenience is when we begin to analyse and be aware of our trash. This insight has changed my life, says Tan Zi Xi.
The piece of experience art “Plastic Ocean” by Tan Zi Xi is by far his most outstanding creation to date. It is a somberly immersive reminder of the long-lasting effects of human activity on the oceans.
11. Yong Ho Ji | Sculptures made with recycled tires
Contemporary Korean sculptor Ji Yong-Ho is well renowned for his unique method of creating his masterpieces from used tyres.
He incorporates a range of animals and legendary hybrids into his figural sculptures. The majority of the figures made by this young Korean artist remind us of genetically modified organisms (GMO), aliens, humanoids, and science fiction monsters that are depicted in mythology and contemporary science fiction books and films.
A good deal of scepticism is shown in the art of Yong Ho Ji against those who attempt to go against nature by mutating DNA to create whole new animal or plant species, human beings, or even forms of life. In addition to allowing him to continue his interest in conventional and precise anatomy, his practise examines the contentious topics of genetic alteration and cultural waste. Currently, the Seoul Museum of Art and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York both have collections of Yong-Ho’s artwork. In Seoul, South Korea, the artist resides and is at work.
12. Jane Perkins | Portraits made of found materials
Jane Perkins is a British artist who describes herself as a “re-maker” who draws ideas for her new works from salvaged and recycled materials.
The majority of the supplies are acquired through boot sales and gifts from friends and neighbours. If she runs out of a specific hue, she will go looking to find more to finish a work. The materials are utilised exactly as they are found; no colour is applied.She uses a wide range of repurposed objects, such as toys, buttons, jewellery, and other found treasures, to create exquisite and vibrant images that harmoniously merge together.