15 Bits of Trash From My Junk Drawers
Eight drawers of incrementally increasing depth hold all my tiniest, junkiest and most inconsequential treasures--eternal and everlasting inspiration in miniature.
I built this cabinet, a bank of drawers arranged as a stack between two slabs of mahogany at a workshop at Penland School of Crafts in about 1980. It’s just six inches wide but 11 inches deep and 28 inches high. It’s a beast, designed to hang on a wall at eye level and flummox foot traffic It's stuffed with every oddity imaginable. There’s a pair of well-used green dice, my son’s baby teeth, a miniature button hook, a rusted pair of dissection scissors, bone fragments, birthday candles and more.
A New York Times article from 2023 detailed what seven well-known artists collected for inspiration and left behind. Carin Goldberg preferred ephemera, as do I.
Here's a list of my favorite and most inspirational objects from my junk drawers. For an artist, inspiration comes from odd and sometimes disturbing crevices of safe keeping. Junk drawer collections are an ever-fecund resource for projects, directions and series. Build your own over time and with loving attention to detail or find a ready made starter kit here on Ebay.
1. Cast Bronze Teeth
What It’s All About
A dear artist friend gifted me this set of bronze teeth cast from life. I adore teeth in any form. Teeth are the unintended gateway to physical intimacy with strangers. My series “Quilting for Dental Professionals” features squares of acrylic paint framing photographs from periodontia texts
2. Taxi Driver Badge
What It’s All About
I was fired from a couple of newspaper jobs, my first after graduating from the University of Michigan in journalism. I took to cab driving. I told my parents driving a taxi was research for a novel. What a bald-faced lie. No way my parents fell for it but they did spare me my dignity. Pictured: closest I ever came to publishing a book: acrylic portrait on cloth book covers.
3.cub scout shoulder patches
What It’s All About
From age three to ten my family lived on an island in the Detroit River. A canal ran through our backyard. Four kids running wild and none of us could swim. My series “Not Drown Island” reimagines the Red Cross water safety guide as a horror story of ghouls and werewolves preying on unsuspecting swimmers.
4.Broken Tine From Hay Rake
What It’s All About
My grandfather was a German butcher who retired and turned a run down dairy farm into a world class tree farm. Hay was a cash crop and one of us broke a tine from his all-wood hay rake. I watched as quick like a flash he carved a new one from a scrap of oak. And imparted in that moment his skill to another generation, I carved this character’s hands from blocks of basswood.
5.Tourist Transparency Niagara Falls 1956
What Its All About
Once upon a time I collected 35 mm transparencies with abandoned-tiny shiny slices of someone else's history cast adrift in thrift stores. I rattled every slide carousel box I found and only a few sounded like surprises inside. My favorite slides became polaroid transfers. Snapshots, transparency or otherwise, are a national treasure of nostalgic wonder. Tons of yet to be crafted tchotchkes. Make mine a slide necklace with matching earrings
6. Tiny Pencil Group
What It’s All About
This collection of tiny #2 pencils reminds me I was once a teacher but not an art teacher. I always wondered when I found these abandoned in my classroom how the students knew it was time to let them go. They’re all still “useable.” Different kids, different classrooms. They remind me of my personal philosophy of resources: nothing is ever too small or insignificant to not have creative value.
7.Clay Pigeon Fragment
What It’s All About
There’s a petroglyph site west of Tucson called Cocoraque Butte. It's on state trust land at the end of a mostly unmarked trail through a couple of cattle gates. Sacred imagery, target shooting and burning one’s porn collection all come together here. I copied one of my favorite petroglyphs on a fragment of clay pigeon I found there. Maybe it’s an alien life form. Maybe these are also alien life forms.
8.Molar Collection
What It’s All About
Teeth again-I’m powerless over teeth in all forms and my life might be unmanageable. I came across this collection of my molars in a plastic box not realizing I had been so tidy and hygienic collecting them. (Denture free still to this day, thank God.) Around 2002 I completed a group of photographs of imaginary saints and angels. The two of my molars from this collection became St. Michaels feet.
9. Machinists Screw Jack
What It’s All About
My father was 4F during World War II so did his bit in a defense plant in Detroit during the war. This screw jack was in my his junk drawer when he died. It's used to support long pieces of steel stock on a milling machine for precise and accurate cutting. My fathers wartime work likely influenced my attraction to the precision required in furniture making. Creativity and technique can traverse, skip and bend through generations of the same family.
10. Pomegranate Fragment
What It’s All About
We don’t eat pomegranates but our tree insists on giving some every year in the spring. A bit of carving rendered a crown from a dried sample I scavenged from our yard. I used it to adorn “Ma”, a photographic tribute to motherhood built around a copperplate print from the 1880’s
11.Green Army Man
What It’s All About
Ubiquitous and yet not so. Humor has always been my gold standard. I imagine a whole platoon of similar Army characters. This one was prominently featured in an assemblage on a C-print titled “For God’s Sake".” The acrylic paint I used has aged remarkably well. If you alter your keepsake do you lose, distort or improve the memory it stands for?
12. Mattress Label
What It’s All About
I’ve had a love affair with ticking fabric for at least 20 years and have regularly scavenged it from wherever I found it. (Ebay seems so much more sanitary than the side of the road but no guarantees.) I have yards and yards of the stuff together with many rolls of striping tape. This I’ve used with spray paint to recreate the look on paper and canvas.
13. Group of Three Milagros
What It’s All About
I moved from the midwest to Tucson via a girlfriend in Florida admitted to the University of Arizona. I fell in love with the city, the culture, and the landscape. Milagros are meant to bring miracles. Mine didn’t. The girlfriend and I got married, had a kid, got divorced and went our separate ways. The milagros I dangled as ornaments on a group of pull toys I created from desert animal skulls and titled after Geronimo.
14. Abalone Shell Hat Pin
What It’s All About
I recall the girl who used to wear this hat pin but not exactly how it came into my possession. I doubt she wants the phone call that would get it back to her. And, it made for lovely fashion in Ma’s role as an ingenue for her first masquerade ball.
15.Birthday Candle Hot Air Engine
What It’s All About
Somewhere, (Only God knows where) my son found directions for making a hot air balloon out of birthday candles and a dry cleaning bag. I doubted his ability and his craftsmanship. To this day I have no idea what dry grass field the thing landed in. We model our talents and skills without realizing when our little ones seem like furniture while we labor at our art/craft. Foolhardy fearless and fun