About Green Art, Garbage Flowers, and Eric Lewis


THE STORY OF GARBAGE FLOWERS Back in January of 2004, while rummaging through a newly acquired collection of junk and assorted garbage, I came upon an old metal cart wheel, possibly from the 1930's. It was heavy, probably cast iron, and oddly beautiful. If only there were a way to keep this thing on display, I remember thinking, so it could be enjoyed and preserved for purely aesthetic reasons.
	The idea of giving it a simple wire stem and putting it in a vase was initially a joke in my mind. But within seconds I was rooting around for my 14 guage steel garden wire, clipped off a two-foot length and tried it. (I've since switched to dry-cleaner's hangers for stems.) It was somewhat intriguing, but it hadn't fully transformed. Again, almost as a joke to myself, I thought, if it had a green leaf on the wire stem, it would work. I created the leaf shape in Illustrator, printed it out on sticky paper, and the first garbage flower was born.
Over the course of the next day or two, I made ten more, out of things I had collected and things from the trash: in order of creation, a dryer knob, a plush lion, a halogen bulb, a microcassette, a baby doll's head, a camera lens attachment, a flattened soda can, the top of a plastic soda bottle, a candy tin and a lightbulb. Number nine, the half-plastic soda bottle, would soon become a favorite, especially the translucent blue and green ones, from bottles of Propel Fitness Water and ginger ale, respectively. America throws out 2.5 million plastic bottles per hour, or 22 billion per year. That's four for every single person on Earth! Granted, many of these are recycled by state and local programs, but the number that go into landfills is still surely in the billions. This fact alone is enough to see potential in Garbage Flowers. But part of what's so novel about Garbage Flowers is that it works for so many kinds of garbage. Unlike the chairs I had designed up to this point, which were singular 'clever' solutions for specific pieces of junk, Garbage Flowers are more like a system that solves for a variety of problematic materials. It was more like I created a machine than a single product. My garbage flower count to date: 703 Check them out -->