This will hang a small painting or drawing on canvas board or on light particleboard or plywood
I love the vision of bending our take-make-waste linear material culture to more circular economies
I am a fan of the work of the people at Zero Waste Yukon, and have often done my best to lend my artistic practice and imagination to their efforts. I love the vision of bending our take-make-waste linear material culture to more circular economies. I was scheduled to teach a workshop as part of their Zero Waste Holiday Challenge.
So this is merely a quibble. But I find “Zero Waste” as a slogan counterproductive. Whatever I try to do, there is still waste. You can’t reshape anything without offcuts. To aspire to waste nothing at all seems discouraging to me. This can lead to just giving up. This column aspires to cultivate hope.
To that end, I will share one personal story of waste reduction gone wrong, and a design for something I use that reduces but does not eliminate waste.
I worked very hard to prepare for and take part in the ReDesign Fair, which Zero Waste Yukon was part of supporting. The week before, I had so many projects to complete and organize!
It felt great to be bringing this body of work in material diverted from the waste stream to its audience. I even made little books out of cracker boxes, with QR codes to some of my favourite Material ReCulturing articles. You can find some of these at Yukon Artists At Work.
Wednesday, I took a break for lunch, frying up some leftover potatoes in the fridge with eggs, pleased that those potatoes were not going to waste.
For dinner I had a lovely moose stew with biscuits.
I am sad to report that I encountered that stew again in the middle of the night. Alas, at lunch, unbeknownst to me, I had given myself a rather violent bout of food poisoning.
In the words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ’twas a rough night.
I’m not sure how I didn’t detect that those potatoes were better suited for the compost bucket than for my lunch, but I had a lot on my mind. And then my moose stew got wasted too.
Clearly, Zero Waste doesn’t mean eating potatoes that are too old. I suppose if I were smarter I would have eaten them up sooner, or cooked fewer in the first place.
I have made my living for years in part by selling small paintings. There are adhesive plastic hangers that make hanging them easy and simple. As part of moving my practice towards a better relationship with materials, I have come up with a way to make these hangers myself out of plastic from the waste stream.
As a gift to you, I am sharing the instructions on how to make these, in case you can use them.
Using these instead of purchasing hangers means that I am eliminating the waste of packaging and shipping those products. There are still offcuts from the plastic, which I imagine will now just fall through the cracks of any recycling process.
Am I just making more microplastics? I’m also using new packing tape. I suppose I could just stop eating salad from plastic boxes – if I did that I could likely still find the plastic, though, because other people will still use them.
I should probably stop using acrylic paint too, as it’s a way to make microplastics. I am not there yet.
Perhaps I’m too literal-minded. But Zero is Zero. So is this a failure or a move in the right direction?
Looking at Zero Waste Yukon’s lovely website, I realize that to change their name would waste all the thinking and design work that’s gone into their webpages.
I’m not writing this column because I have all the answers. I’m writing it out of my own confusion, and to gather and celebrate your stories of successes.
So please do send me stories of the steps you’re taking and the things you’re learning how to do. I want to gather up these ideas so they don’t go to waste.
I’m also hoping to write an article inspired by my Grandma. I wore her hand-me-downs for years. When I heard Yukon Indigenous elders speaking about not wasting any part of the moose I hear her talking about butchering pigs in Saskatchewan, how they used every part of that pig.
I have this idea that, Indigenous or non-Indigenous, we’re living in a culture that has rapidly become more wasteful. What do you think? What did your elders and grandparents do, or show you, or share with you, that embodies a different relationship with materials than our current culture practices?
Please send your stories to materialreculturing@yahoo.com.
Thank you. And take care with what you eat.
How to make a lightweight picture hanger
This will hang a small painting or drawing on canvas board or on light particleboard or plywood. Depending on the weight of the material, 8×10” is probably the maximum size, though for plywood or particle board I would probably not go larger than 5×7”.
Materials:
Rigid but flexible clear plastic, like that found in salad boxes, though there are abundant other sources.
Clear packing tape
Permanent marker
Pen or pencil
Flat-headed thumbtack for preference, though a small nail will work too
Tools:
Ruler
3-hole punch with a half inch metal plate at the centre hole
Steps:
1. Cut out the blank for your hanger from the clear plastic, about 1.5×2 inches, though a variety of sizes around this can work.
2. Make 2 points with the ruler and your marker to find the centre line down the longer dimension of your rectangle.
3. Push the hanger into the 3-hole punch lining up the centre line with the centre line on the middle plate in the 3-hole punch.
4. Move the hanger to one side, to within about 1/16-1/8 inch of the edge of the metal plate. Punch again.
5. Do the other side the same way. This will give you a horizontal slit with a kind of serrated edge, like commercial picture hangers.
6. Use a pen or pencil to draw a centre line down the back of your small artwork.
7. Cut a piece of clear packing tape. Attach it to the picture hanger about 3/8-1/2 of an inch down from your holes. There should be 1/2-3/4 inch of tape around the two sides and bottom.
8. Line the centre line on your artwork up with the one on your picture hanger. Let the top of the hanger be about 1/2 inch or so down from the top edge.
9. Press the tape down securely around the 3 bottom edges of your hanger.
10. Press your thumbtack into the wall at the desired place.11. Hang your artwork on the thumbtack. The friction of the thumbtack head will work with that of the painting against the wall to keep it level.
