Gretchen M. Alexander
"When life Gives You Junk Mail, Create!"
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| (Photos by Patrick Fraser) |
My mailbox is placed at the edge of my front garden. Often, I open it to find a plethora of unsolicited but colorful travel brochures, subscription offers, political announcements and advertisements. Most of the time I drop these unwanted items in the recycling bin on my way into the house. This summer’s “junk” mail seemed to offer an especially heavy volume of colorful, expensively printed items, and I began to wonder how quickly the earth would be covered by this unwanted print material if society did not recycle/reuse the items.
My moss and lichen covered mask represents the verdant and life supporting earth. Unsolicited “junk mail” is just one small portion of the debris our society generates daily that is consuming more and more acreage of our land, polluting our water, and defiling the landscape.
The flowers and leaves adorning the mask are created from thank-you notes, greeting cards and unsolicited junk mail received during May and June 2014. Repeated mailings from several cultural institutions allowed me to make multiple flowers of the same color.
Turning the “junk” paper into embellishments for the mask is a metaphor to encourage us to find creative, useful ways to repurpose/
re-use/recycle materials rather than burying our earth with discards.