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Artist Sara Sullivan looking for recycled materials

Wed 27 Apr 2011

Sara Sullivan - www.stickandstone.co.uk
Sara Sullivan - www.stickandstone.co.uk

I am an artist that works in recycled materials, and for 10 years I have worked with The Devon Guild of Craftsmen as an artist in schools. I am constantly on the look out for old paddling pools, li-lo's and plastics for art. I can re-use these by cutting them into strips with strong scissors and rag-rugging or weaving them. I have an internet site www.stickandstone.co.uk,  where you can see some of the projects I have run in schools, including the building of a 9ft bee in a primary school in Sidmouth ( a commission after the school saw the huge recycled bee at the Eden Project) and a woven plastic landscape and Pippi Longstocking at St.Michaels Primary in Kingsteignton. Recent projects have included Wacky Wizard of Oz flowers made in All Saints Academy, Plymouth in March 2011 and in April I will be making beautiful plastic butterflies in Wynstream Primary on Burnthouse Lane in Exeter. If you can donate some bright flexible plastics to my cause I will guarantee that they are put to good use. Re-using them is better than putting them in the ground!

Recently I have had an urge to make a couple of pieces about trade and industrialization. These would be re-makings of commonplace household items, one being a persian carpet with the pattern of the garden of Eden on it, and another being The Willow Pattern plate which features a different luscious garden on it. All the features on the plate have a meaning, and as a child I can remember being told the story of the plate by my paternal grand-mother. It is a story of a girl who lived in the garden and the gardener she fell in love with. Her father was a Mandarin and lived in the Pagoda. He finds out that his daughter wants to be with a man of low class, and in his disgust  he banishs the gardener and builds a high fence around the garden to keep him out. There are a few different versions of the tale but in the one I heard, her father has already promised her hand in marriage to an accountant, so he locks her up in a smaller pagoda in the garden – to keep her in. On the day of her wedding the girl’s lover appears and runs away with her (stealing the dowry at the same time) and you can see them crossing the bridge with the Mandarin in hot pursuit. (I thought they looked like walking fish when I was a child! Maybe they were all wearing tight Kimonos, so even hot pursuit was a fairly sedate activity.) Anyway the lovers escape but usually the story ends badly. The Mandarin spends the rest of his natural tracking them down, the garden goes to wrack and ruin, the lovers are caught, brought back home on a boat and put to death. However they cannot be parted, so that even in death their souls seek one another out and are reincarnated as turtle doves.

The Willow Pattern Plate is  an interesting artefact for other reasons. The mass production of the plate is a story of the industrial revolution and as such it says something about economics and how we came to live in cities. Here we have an item that everyone is familiar with, but the very fact that it is so familiar is a sign of its mass production. This makes it an indicator of  people’s lives becoming removed  from the land and environment. I am interested in this plate for what it represents as well as the half remembered childhood stories. For me the fact that it depicts a garden adds to the  resonance of its meanings, in that I would be recreating  a garden with plastics that would normally shoved the ground. I want to make a large wall hanging - perhaps 10ft x 6ft - that is made from layers of plastics and plastic woven into chicken wire. I need to collect some coloured plastics before I start on these projects. If you are throwing any away you could call me first and I might be able to collect or otherwise my studio is at Higher Brookfield in Lustleigh, just off the Moretonhampstead to Bovey Rd. Tel Sara 01647 277586

I can also re-use semi rigid corrugated plastic signs and feed sacks, but if possible could they be (relatively) clean. Thankyou very much!



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