Artist's Statement

Jay Tyrrell

POST CONSUMER

Perhaps like you, I love to shop online, a click away from gratification. A truck rolls up and delivers your need, hardly having had to wait at all.

I recently moved to a semi-rural location, a brick and mortar store a drive away. All favorite things, endless imagined needs and desires are now ordered online. Suddenly the occasional package becomes a mountain of recyclables and I find myself trying to make sense of the pile. Packaging engineers have unlimited resources on shapes and materials designing a protective cocoon. Seeing these materials as inspiration to create sculptural objects to photograph and make art became the basis for this project.

Often after unpacking something, the packaging is more exciting than what was ordered. The highly engineered and designed packaging to protect the shipment becomes the sculpture for a piece and reference for its title. So all those peanuts, bubble wrap, paper dunnage, cardboard boxes and ephemera used to pack my online buying habit, originally headed to the recycling depot, have taken a detour through my studio, becoming the material I have used to form objects crafting abstract still life portraits.

My intent with this body of work is to make it playful, using bright colors as background including a sense of humor as I designed and titled these pieces. Thank you to all those grade school art teachers for all the learned skills of gluing and cutting that were used to make the objects fly or hold them still.

Have you checked your recycling lately?