Category: Odd materials

Coffee-cup insulators are made of a delightful small-scale corrugated paper. I think of it as the elegant cousin of the corrugated cardboard that so much of our gifts travel about in during their busy lives, before and after wrapping.

This wrap sought to integrate that material into the vocabulary of wrap. I thought some scraps of silver paper constituted a perfect contrast to the flat, plain color and dimensional complexity of the coffee cardboard. I wrapped the ends of the gift with two pieces. I added some solid green, contrasting in darkness and low reflectivity to the silver. Then I added the two bands of cardboard.

Blue gauze ribbon, placed in wrap’s traditional 90-degree style, brings yet another note to our chord of textures. I did not want to cut the ribbon scrap, so I overlapped it with an offset, emphasizing its transparency and gaining two additional visual lines in that plane.

The name tag is an office-supply folder label.

Pies from our Whole Foods come in marvelous molded-plastic containers. Put the bottom halves from two of them together and you have a strange round device that resembles some kind of off-road tire, or perhaps the base form of a dark space ship.

Those two pieces of black plastic are glued together using 1-inch-long pieces of popsickle sticks. They are hot-glued into little slots conveniently located around the molded shape of the pie-bin bottoms

I next made the feet for this wrap using four lids from aerosol deodorants. Their plastic is metallic adding more machine aesthetic to this peculiar wrap.

I glued a sequence of bottle caps on ten of the twenty raised knobs that ring the pie bottoms’ flat central circle, adding to the visual theme of circles. Their detailed design and printing enriches the design by bringing a finer level of detail to the complex but larger forms of the black plastic.

It actually took a while to figure out what to put in that central, flat circular space. I cut out various magazine-ad photographs and also fragments of wrapping paper and art paper. Nothing seemed to be compelling. I finally decided to use my own photography. I made a circular crop of a photo I took last week while hiking in the Comb Ridge of southern Utah. I added a black “inner glow” in Photoshop. I printed it, cut it out and glued it into the circular recess.

In order to spare the recipient the potential anxiety of having to destroy such a curious sculpture, I cut out the circular recess on the back side and made it into an access door closed with simple tape fixtures.

An amazing quantity of exotic materials flows through our households every day.

As a part of 1) my quest to divert some of the more charming of these objects away from the dumpster and 2) my need to reduce the volume of my in-studio recycling bins, I made this wrap.

I started with a long yellow foam tray that once held chicken breasts. I cut it in half and glued the two halves together. That leaves an almost-closed box; only the bottom is open.

Resolving to solve that later, I began to trim out the yellow box. The edge where the halves join I covered with a white cord taken from a shopping bag. I then glued dark-green chenille stems into vertical depressions in the foam tray. I glued orange-juice caps in a column between the stems. I clipped small shiny red beads from a scrap of bead-cord and glued them into the eye-shaped molded depressions in the foam tray.

After a bit of testing, I chose another foam tray for the base. I trimmed off the lip that runs around its edge and glued on a scrap of lime-colored ribbon. Then I placed the gift inside the yellow shell. I made a door in the base foam, so the gift could be removed without destroying the wrap; I taped the door shut. I glued the two foam objects together.

I was not yet ready to stop. The wrap seemed to want more. I glued a piece of black bag-handle  cord to the join between black and yellow foam. Adding these extra components have a powerful effect. The identity of the foam as food-packaging trash begins to recede, and the underlying power of the foam’s native form and its beautiful qualities asserts itself.

Thus inspired I took a single scrap of thick white foam from my tiny-foam-scraps bag. I cut it in half and had two Cycladic ears (c.f. church architecture of Santorini), which I glued to the top of the wrap. Picking up conceptual momentum, I added the red/white bag-handle cord. And I added the gold fringe ribbon to the ears.

I stood back and contemplated the wrap. It had a new and mysterious appeal, all its own, of numinous packaging.