Trash turns to treasure in artist's hands

Eve Armstrong finds her inspiration in inorganic rubbish and junk-shops. Photo / Kenny Rodger

Street inorganic rubbish collections and second-hand shops are treasure troves of inspiration for artist Eve Armstrong, who uses found objects for making sculptures and collages.

"I don't know what I'm looking for but I know it when I see it," said Armstrong, who is artist-in-residence at McCahon House in Titirangi.

"At the moment I have ridiculous amounts of buckets," she said while preparing for a show of her work at McCahon House from May 31 to June 5.

Sculptures which use recycled materials such as flattened cardboard, packing tape and rolls of discarded carpet have tweaked public interest at previous exhibitions in New Zealand, Australia, Southeast Asia and Germany.

For the sculptures in her show, Armstrong is using objects found in opportunity shops and a surplus store's offering of used shop fittings, which is larger than usual because so many businesses are closing down.

For the large collages, Armstrong is taking photographs of objects found in kerbside collections and also in junk mail.

"It's like objects at the other end of their life," she said. "People have seen the catalogues, bought the stuff and it's ended up on the street again."

Her work is modelled on trade - "needing and finding, this goes with that, that props up this, things go up and things go down".

Armstrong, who graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2003, said that to her found materials were visually exciting.

This month, the 10 years of work by the McCahon House Trust to restore the cottage of painter Colin McCahon were recognised when it won the national Institute of Architect Award for Heritage.

Trust manager Cynthia Smith said Eve Armstrong was working surrounded by the rural sights and sounds of the bush and the debris of the kauri in leaf fall.

Unfortunately, her residency coincided with the demise of the Waitakere City Council's annual street inorganic rubbish collection, so she had to travel into the suburbs of Central Auckland to find material for her photo collages.