My Plastic Love Affair & the Salvage Art Summit

What I do want to talk about is I want to tell you a little bit about my own journey of creative reuse and how I wound up in this place where I'm all of a sudden making a summit.

all about creative reuse so I have been delivering a lecture about my art practice for many years now to various guilds and art centers and institutions and stuff like that and I have been calling that lecture alternative stitching practices and even though I thought it was a good title and I came up with it many, many years ago, I realized that really that is the through line to my art practice.

That is my art practice in a nutshell, because I'm always seeking alternatives to the stitching.

It's been a long time since I've done regular kind of stitching.

Actually, that's not true.

Now that I've said it, it's not true.

Very recently, I had a commission of making a whole bunch of wedding satchels from a wedding gown skirt that required very regular stitching and that is very different from my stitching practice my art practice aside from the fact that it was repurposing as well although no plastic was involved in that So I always credit my thrifty upbringing in the Soviet Russia for my art practice.

I think really that's where it started.

I did not consider myself an artist as a kid.

I was an artistic kid.

I loved to draw.

I loved to create things.

But I didn't consider myself an artist.

I was just an arty kid.

um art class was my favorite um but i had a very thrifty upbringing when you're growing up in the soviet russia in the 70s you are likely have to be thrifty by just by design because that's how it was you didn't have access you couldn't go to you know the supermarket or a big box store or even a little box store and just get everything you wanted.

Products were scarce.

And even though I didn't really realize that as a kid, that was just how it was.

Now I can see back into it.

So you had to make do.

You had to learn to make do from a very early age.

I remember my parents redoing the bathroom pretty much themselves.

And you know, the tiles, you couldn't find enough of the matching tiles.

So you mixed and matched.

and you made do and you did your best whatever you did you made do with i you know things were just not available so you had to make do anyhow um we came to the united states in 1979 and i continued on my art journey i went to the high school of art and design in new york city and then pratt institute in brooklyn and i wound up working in fashion I always thought I would be a fashion designer or fashion adjacent.

I remember my very first thought about a future career was as a kid was thinking that I could do pattern design or fabric design or something of that sort.