I decided to go live today, November 1. We’ve received bottles from some of our test sites and I wanted to make a post to Facebook announcing our project. Tomorrow night is November Art Walk and we are having an opening at Studio 121 to show the test wall and model. I’m working on a small video to introduce the project. Let’s see how this project spreads.
We’re hoping to have a small opening for Art Walk this Wednesday night to show the test wall and model and to recruit some messengers. We will also have plenty of empty bottles and notes for visitors to write their messages. But the deal is, take a bottle, bring back 5 (or more!). We will probably do our first post on Facebook tomorrow. Keeping our fingers crossed that this project will take off.
I’ve been thinking about the wall model for quite some time, and had the planter bases constructed two weeks ago. Originally I wanted to represent each individual bottle with a piece of a drinking straw, that would end up being 0.6 inches long. We bought a box of 3000 from Costco and started cutting. What I ended up doing today is constructing a model using styrofoam insulation sheets, so I could just study the “massing” of the bottles in the planter, and to get an idea of the overall look of the wall. This was going to be a work in process, so I knew I needed something relatively easy to cut and assemble.
My initial design has the wall linear with a wave built into the top. There are three layers shown, with a total bottle count for this design of about 60,000. I hope we can reach at least this size for the wall. More bottles would translate into more layers, while keeping the total height at around 6 feet. Any higher I think I will be getting into some stability issues. The styrofoam was easy to work with especially with a hot wire cutter. Just my kind of material.
Dorian is still collecting empty bottles for an additional test wall. Can’t have too many bottles on hand. Today was the Run for the Cure downtown, so Dorian arrived when the race was finishing to do her collection. It takes her a while to get comfortable diving into the trash cans, but once she gets going she forgets to be embarrassed. We’ve got a good cause too! Once she has a bag half full, people start giving her their bottles, which makes things easier. Later today, our good friends Jose and Frances, started collecting at Veteran’s Park in St. Johns County. Seems like most of the parks down here have special recycle containers for cans and bottles, which made things a lot easier. Today the parks were crowded with lots of soccer games. Thanks Dorian, Jose, and Frances for the bottle booty today!
Yesterday I moved the test wall into our room that we will use for a production area. The wall was easy to move, in fact you can just pick it up or slide it along the floor. Two 5 ft x 6 ft panels are wedged together between a column and a wall. I built a cardboard shim to make everything snug. Today I took a few photos just to get a feel for the wall. I find that photography allows you to go deeper with a subject, whether it is a person, a landscape, or a wall of plastic bottles. Finding something interesting is always a good exercise. The 25 x40 room we have is adjacent to my studio and is basically a large rectangular space. For now it is empty which is great. Soon it will be filled with bottles if all goes well.
As I start working on the second section of the test wall I ask myself is this really art or just a bunch of water bottles glued together. When does something make the transition from stuff to art? I remind myself that the purpose of testing things out is to learn the material and see what works and what doesn’t. I didn’t have an expectation of producing a piece of art, that’s why it’s called a “test” wall, not a “masterpiece” wall. So it’s ok that it isn’t gallery or museum ready. But looking at it from different angles and light does reveal some interesting properties of the bottles. Especially the translucency of the plastic and the patterns of the multi-colored caps on the “topside” of the wall. I think the transition to “art” happens when the “stuff” ceases to be stuff, and becomes part of a whole that feels and looks totally new. When you look at the wall and it has it’s own personality as a whole, then it ceases to be a pile of recycled plastic. If it expresses the intent of the artist, then I guess it becomes art. What do you think?
Made more progress today (Sunday) on the wall. No A/C in the studio, so it was getting a bit warm. If you’ve smelled silicone caulk curing you know it has this sour smell reminiscent of old gym clothes. The part of the wall I built yesterday was set and it held together well. After about 3 ft of height, I noticed that the bottles were tilting towards the cap side. This is because most of the bottles (Dasani the biggest culprit) have a base that is slightly wider than the top. I had to cut small shims to even out the tilt, another painful detail. The first section of the test wall, 5 ft long and almost 6 ft high was complete.
I’ve been waiting to build a test wall for a few weeks now. 10 ft long, 6 ft high. Actually, I have no idea how this wall will go together. I tested some silicone caulk a few days ago and it held tightly. But you know what happens when you step into the unknown, right? In my studio I set up a cardboard jig to hold the bottles. I decided to build it in place, as a wall, in two 5 ft long sections. Good thing I had some corrugated cardboard that I rescued from the movers. A few big pieces yielded enough to setup two side forms and a base. I marked these off at 1 ft increments. I started going through the bags of bottles and realized that most of them still had labels and were filled with a bit of water from the cleanings. So I labored through label peeling and emptying each bottle as much as I could. Finally I had a pile of about 100, and started gluing them together. I soon discovered that there is an art to all of this, and that to properly glue bottles of varying shapes and sizes you had to do a little fitting and finagling, I suspect like a stone mason building a wall. Each bottle needed to be fit to see where the contact points were to adjacent bottles. You can’t just glob a mess of caulk like mortar, that stuff is expensive! After about two hours I had about 2 ft high of wall built.
Dorian’s been busy, this morning she went out to a walk-a-thon for breast cancer. Going through banana peels and other trash, she rescued these beauties for the test wall. Another week of collection at Mandarin Middle plus these gives us enough to start the wall.
Here’re our bottles from the weekend, about 240, sorted, washed, and ready for the test wall. We hauled everything to the backyard and hosed then down, cut off the labels, and rinsed out the juice and sports drink containers. There was something greasy and gross in the recyclables we got from Mandarin Middle School. But the bottles from the road race were perfect. I’m only up to about 400 so 1600 more to go.
I also added some resources to the How to Help page, some downloadable PDFs that you can print. Project description, signs, instructions, and even a business card.
We are trying to recruit a few test groups for the project with some success. We will document those as soon as they are in place. Thanks to everyone for your encouragement and help!
