Udine, Italy

Chris Gilmour creates incredible life-sized sculptural structures using only cardboard and glue…

Beauvais, France

Gilles Eichenbaum, aka GARBAGE, make some fine lamps from discarded objects… enjoy more here.

(Thanks to my dear Brazilian friend Ruth Klotzel for the link).

Jakarta, Indonesia

I’ve recently become acquainted with a remarkable fellow: Bambang P. Eryanto (thanks to the vagaries of the Internet). Artist, engineer, entrepreneur, visionary… Bambang graduated with a degree in Science in 1998, at which time he left his hometown for the capital of Indonesia… “supposedly promising jobs and an exciting career,” some 500km from his home village, armed with a mere Rp 50.000  (less than USD $6), given to him by his parents.

In Bambang’s own delightful ESL parlance: “In my heart I promise I will not go home until I was quite successful. Long story short I experienced a lot of work, until finally I stood alone and own a business in the field of electrical and construction, has been almost 10 years I wrestle this field there is a feeling saturated, but I can not leave this business, because many are related, such as employees, family and many who rely on this business, also the suppliers who have to sell the goods to us. At the moment getting fed up that I began to delegate to others who can help my leadership, step by step moving towards success.”

“From here I went back to my hobby rather (than) lie fallow, that is painting. Actually painting hobby I’ve lived since the year 1976, when it I was only 16 years old.  Although it was a hobby but I do professionally, and several times exhibitions, including solo exhibition, this achievement that makes me happy, because I was self-taught painter. But I knew painted does not involve a lot of people, all I can do myself, I realize living in developing countries, I met a lot of unemployed, homeless, beggars, people who are not school. If I just paint, I’m very selfish, and there is a feeling of sin is still a lot to see my people suffer. My Country which is too limited, there is no unemployment benefits, no medical benefits and education fee is very expensive for the average person. On the other hand I also can not build a new company and hold them to pay, because companies need time to build, capital and skills that are not small. While they need to eat right away.”

“Apparently God Allmighty—knowing will be his people who want to help others, not much in the environment and power grid construction projects in my company. There are many things I find stuff like the rest of the project, iron pipes, Polycarbonate, PVC pipe, various bottles, wire, etc. Year 2005, from here I began encouraging because things I found was actually new, though it rest. And the most appalling is the number of pvc pipes are sometimes thrown away, and we know plastic decompose in the ground it took more than 100 years. Wire, bottles and crumpled Polycarbonate also granted, sometimes just thrown in the trash.”

You likely get the picture. Bambang re-purposes discarded materials to create employment for others as well as delightful one-of-a-kind artifacts that are useful, emotionally engaging, and in an odd sense… redemptive. Visit his website to learn more, here.

Images: A selection of the delightfully functional assemblages that Bambang et al put together… rock on, Bambang!

Munich, Germany

I love stumbling across old trade magazine covers like this…

Winnipeg, Canada

The great Canadian educator, philosopher, scholar, literary critic, rhetorician, and communication theorist Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born 100 years ago today, in Edmonton—though he grew up and studied here in the ‘Peg before moving on to Cambridge, Windsor, Toronto… and the world stage. McLuhan was a man of idioms and idiosyncrasies, deeply intelligent, and a soothsayer… learn more about him here.

Anyone who follows this blog knows that I quote McLuhan regularly (almost an understatement)… as you can witness here. I regret that I never got to meet him in person, though I did become acquainted with one of his daughters and her husband some years ago…

Thanks for all you left us to ponder, Marshall!

Image: one of a special set of Millennium stamps issued by Canada Post.

Zermatt, Switzerland

The first ascent of the iconic Matterhorn (yes, the one on the triangular-shaped Toblerone chocolate package) was made by Edward Whymper, Lord Francis Douglas, Charles Hudson, Douglas Hadow, Michel Croz, and the two Zermatt guides, Peter Taugwalder father and son on 14 July 1865. Douglas, Hudson, Hadow and Croz were killed on the descent when Hadow slipped and pulled the other three with him down the north face. Whymper and the Taugwalder guides, who survived, were later accused of having cut the rope below to ensure that they were not dragged down with the others, but the subsequent inquiry found no proof of this and they were acquitted.

The Matterhorn accident was long discussed in the media, in Switzerland and abroad… newspapers all over the world reported the tragedy and no other Alpine event has ever caused more headlines. Read the full background to this memorable event in mountaineering history here.

Matterhorn photo (cropped) by Juan Rubiano; Illustrations of Whymper et al’s ascent and disastrous descent are by Gustave Doré.

“A single slip,
or a single false step,
has been the sole cause
of this frightful calamity.”

—Edward Whymper

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Some fun experiments in lid-design from Good, an agency in Kazakshstan (see more here).

—Kenyan proverb

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In the history of twentieth-century fashion and portrait photography, Horst’s contribution figures as one of the most artistically significant and long lasting, spanning as it did the sixty years between 1931 and 1991. During this period, his name became legendary as a one-word photographic byline, and his photographs came to be seen as synonymous with the creation of images of elegance, style and rarefied glamour.

Born on 14 August 1906 in Weißenfels-an-der-Saale, Germany, Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann was the second son of a prosperous middle class Protestant shop owner, Max Bohrmann and his wife, Klara Schoenbrodt.

The first pictures that carried a Horst credit line appeared in the December 1931 issue of French Vogue. It was a full-page advertisement showing a model in black velvet holding a Klytia scent bottle in one hand with the other hand raised elegantly above it… Horst’s real breakthrough as a published fashion and portrait photographer was in the pages of British Vogue… starting with the 30 March 1932 issue showing three fashion studies and a full-page portrait of the daughter of Sir James Dunn, the art patron and supporter of Surrealism…

(Learn more about Horst here, and view a collection of selected works here).

Fort Wayne, Indiana (USA)

Driven by a passion to fit odd shapes together and a strange sympathy towards discarded objects, Sayaki Kajita Ganz creates organic forms with thrift store plastics and found metal objects.

In her own words, Sayaki expains: “I was born in Japan and spent my early childhood there. Japanese Shinto beliefs are such that all objects and organisms have spirits, and objects that are discarded before their time weep at night inside the trash bin, or so they teach children at many preschools. This became a vivid image in my mind. I grew up moving to several different countries and the constant need to adjust to a new environment also gave me a strong desire to fit in, and to make people and objects surrounding me fit together to create harmony.”

“I use kitchen utensils, toys and metal objects and appliance wire among other things. I only select objects that have been used and discarded. My goal is for each object to transcend its origins by being integrated into the form of an animal or some other organism that seems alive and in motion. This process of reclamation and regeneration is liberating to me as an artist. By building these sculptures I try to understand the human situations and relationships that surround me. It is a way for me to contemplate and remind myself that even if there is conflict right now, there is a way for all the pieces to fit together.”

“We do not have to fit together perfectly with the people we love. Even if you see a wide gap in some places and small holes in others, when one steps back and sees the whole community from the distance there is still great beauty and harmony there. Even if some people don’t feel at home here and now, there is a place where they belong they will eventually find it.”

View many more of her incredible assemblages here.

(Thanks to my Circle colleague Adrian Shum for putting Sayaki on my radar…).