One Man's Waste is Another Man's Warhol
by Steffani Jemison
Quick! What could you do with 170 pounds of snow tire chains? How about 500 cheese graters? 5000 cell phone covers? Choose it or lose it—if you don't grab now, your future masterpiece will be buried in the dump, along with the rest of the day's trash. But no pressure—it's all in a day's work for 
sculptor Rick Carpenter, the current artist-in-residence at Norcal Waste System's Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center (also known as the San Francisco dump). The “Trash to Treasures” program offers a fully-equipped studio and “access to materials”—which is all of the garbage produced daily in the Bay Area.
“The colors and the textures I get from the dump are more exciting than anything I could buy or make,” raves Carpenter, and he's not alone. Artists across America are finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places: local beaches crusted with plastic litter, barren city sidewalks, and even the ripe piles of refuse at the local landfill. And why not? Artists turn to found objects (they're touchy about the word “trash”) because the materials are cheap, provocative, challenging to work with, and, many artists maintain, extremely beautiful.
JerryRoss Barrish, a California-based sculptor who has worked exclusively with plastics for decades, says his materials are “just as precious to me as if I were working in stone or wood or marble.” The material, he says, “speaks” to him; the finished sculpture, usually a figurative work, grows like a “miracle.” Says Barrish, whose first piece was a Christmas tree assembled from pieces of plastic he found on the beach, “there's something really gritty about found materials, a second chance.”
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