Amanda Nelsen: Recycling Is an Art Form

Since my last post “Judging a Book by Its Cover”, I keep coming back to books. Call it happenstance, internal volition because when I came across Amanda Nelsen and her work on The Artful Desperado, I didn’t realize she is also a book artist and binder. {I digress…}

Here 40,000 pieces of junk mail was transformed into art by Amanda Nelsen. She makes the viewer re-evaluate society’s use of  paper and printing resources by recycling the ever increasing and hated junk mail, often repurposing them into a conventionally treasured form of books.

If Others

Kinkade Recycled (Mountain Retreat)

“This 8 by 5 foot wall hanging is comprised of approximately 40,000 pieces of junk mail, folded and string bundled into 2 inch cubes to create colored pixels. The arrangement of square paper bundles depicts an idealized scene of human’s relationship to nature (based on a painting by Thomas Kinkade). The minute collection of junk mail used to create “pixels” of the image suggests that the earth’s resources are not being used as bucolically as we might like to think. The process was completed over a period of about five months and involved several wonderful helpers! After being shown at the University Gallery in Cambridge, MA the piece was expanded to 10 x 6 feet in order to complete the entire landscape composition.”

Amanda Nelsen, Artist