Found Objects

After exploring the exquisite ideas and 35 projects showcased in this one-of-a-kind jewelry collection, you’ll never look at "found items” the same way again. There are countless suggestions for recycling everyday objects, from electrical wire to soda cans, and uncovering their vast potential for beauty. Begin by examining various metal types and forms, and the techniques for shaping and cold-connecting them. Select from a range of surface finishing treatments, and find out about special skills often used for working with stones, shells, plastic, wood, and bone. The wildly creative pieces include a driftwood brooch, a bracelet with wooden game pieces, and a pendant featuring old boat charts.

Inspiring examples of turning discarded items into beautiful wearable art.

This must-have book for newcomers to the popular art of bookmaking teaches all the basics and features easy and interesting projects that allow self-expression and experimentation. More experienced bookmakers and paper enthusiasts will also note that it offers a wealth of practical tips and techniques in one handy resource. All the basic bookmaking techniques include lots of specialized tips. Simple book structures, miniature books, and a wide variety of projects that highlight themes such as travel, music, even wearable books -- a book necklace and earrings -- provide creative variations on traditional ideas. The authors share innovative, unique, and previously unpublished binding structures that incorporate scrolls, flaps, folders, and more. In addition, some book projects are made from unusual materials or found objects, such as a book out of a ukulele, a real accordion book, a book diorama in a cigar box, and other experimental creations.

In this first book of interviews with visual artists from across Texas, more than sixty artists reflect on topics from seminal influences and inspirations to their common engagement with found materials. Beyond the art itself, no source is more primary to understanding art and artist than the artist’s own words. After all, who can speak with more authority about the artist’s influences, motivations, methods, philosophies, and creations? Since 2010, Robert Craig Bunch has interviewed sixty-four of Texas’ finest artists, who have responded with honesty, clarity, and—naturally—great insight into their own work. None of these interviews has been previously published, even in part. Incorporating a striking, full-color illustration of each artist’s work, these absorbing self-examinations will stand collectively as a reference of lasting value.

If you've ever wanted to learn the secrets which turn a tap handle into a mysterious woman from the sea, which transform plastic aquarium plants into subterranean roots stretching far beneath the known world and those which can make an icy cave from a bourbon box, then prepare yourself for inspiration that will have you checking your trash bin, twice. &break;&break;In Secrets of Rusty Things, renowned assemblage artist Michael DeMeng guides you down the intuitive, curious and often rock-strewn path of an artist's creative process, where illusions are just as important as any other aspect to the art. You'll discover new ideas of where to look for, not only discarded objects, but new items that you may not have previously seen as having a place in a future work of art. You'll be inspired by ways to add meaningful symbolism to your artworks' stories both through the use of color and shape. And you'll see how an ancient tale can parallel the artist's plight and invoke a new piece of art. &break;&break;From the pondering of each ancient myth and its connection to the modern-day artist, to the gluing together of objects, to the paint that unifies and disguises the original bits and pieces, this is an intimate view into the creative process unlike any workshop you've ever attended.

This book shows how art therapists can use found objects in their work with clients. Found objects can be a highly affordable, imaginative and creative way of working, and are particularly effective when working with marginalised populations and clients who have experienced trauma. This edited collection contains chapters from a wide variety of contributors from around the world and covers a vast array of topics, including the use of found objects in clinical settings, community and art practice, pedagogy and self-care. This is the ideal resource for any art therapist wishing to explore the use of this non-traditional medium to enrich their practice.

A literary history of the old, broken, rusty, dusty, and moldy stuff that people dug up in England during the long eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century, antiquaries—wary of the biases of philosophers, scientists, politicians, and historians—used old objects to establish what they claimed was a true account of history. But just what could these small, fragmentary, frequently unidentifiable things, whose origins were unknown and whose worth or meaning was not self-evident, tell people about the past? In Artifacts, Crystal B. Lake unearths the four kinds of old objects that were most frequently found and cataloged in Enlightenment-era England: coins, manuscripts, weapons, and grave goods. Following these prized objects as they made their way into popular culture, Lake develops new interpretations of works by Joseph Addison, John Dryden, Horace Walpole, Jonathan Swift, Tobias Smollett, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, among others. Rereading these authors with the artifact in mind uncovers previously unrecognized allusions that unravel works we thought we knew well. In this new history of antiquarianism and, by extension, historiography, Lake reveals that artifacts rarely acted as agents of fact, as those who studied them would have claimed. Instead, she explains, artifacts are objects unlike any other. Fragmented and from another time or place, artifacts invite us to fill in their shapes and complete their histories with our imaginations. Composed of body as well as spirit and located in the present as well as the past, artifacts inspire speculative reconstructions that frequently contradict one another. Lake's history and theory of the artifact will be of particular importance to scholars of material culture and forms. This fascinating book provides curious readers with new ways of evaluating the relationships that exist between texts and objects.

Make mosaics on any surface--mirrors, tables, chairs, picture frames, bowls, switch plate covers, wooden shoes, and more.

In 1912 Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso created the first papiers colles by gluing pieces of oak-grained faux bois wallpaper onto their drawings. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp selected a urinal, signed it R. Mutt, and presented it as an object of art under the title Fountain. In 1919 Kurt Schwitters began gathering scraps of rubbish and assembled them into a series of works that he titled Merz constructions. These acts represent three of the most significant achievements in twentieth-century art. The definitive book on its subject, Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object offers a comprehensive and dynamic history of the mediums that revolutionized our ideas about the nature of art and influenced virtually every major art movement of the twentieth century. Made up of fragments, of debris, of rejected pieces and common artifacts of popular culture, collage and assemblage are arts of protest, of challenge, of exploration. They emphasize the everyday and commonplace over precious materials and refinement; concept and process over end product; the temporary and ephemeral over the lasting. They propose a dislocation in time and space and, by the nature of their makeup, offer multiple layers of meaning. They also furnish a compelling historical record of their time. All these currents are explored by Diane Waldman, deputy director and senior curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In clear and cogent prose, generously illustrated with examples and comparative works, she traces collage, the found object - and the related development, assemblage - from their Cubist beginnings to the present. Waldman moves from the outrageous experiments of the Dadaists in the 1920s to the irreverent debunkings of the 1960s Pop artists to the provocative appropriation art of the 1990s; from the intricate towers and assemblages of the Russian Constructivists early in this century to the surprising piles of materials put together by such midcentury artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and John Chamberlain; from the cerebral and Freudian collages and objects of the Surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s to the probing conundrums posed by the conceptualists of the 1980s and 1990s. A lively book on lively arts, Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object gives us a comprehensive and dynamic view of what are arguably the most important artistic developments of our time.