(Saturdays at 11:00 am and Sundays at 11:00 am)
ARTS FEATURES
"What is plastic made out of?" Marlow asks the students. "Actually, I'm going to give you a hint: it's black and we pump it out of the ground."
A tiny voice says, "Oil."
The students know the world's oil supply is limited. "So we need to recycle our plastic because it is a non-renewable resource," Marlow reminds them.
Marlow takes recycling into the creative realm, and the kids are quick to understand that like materials, ideas can be transformed into something else—works of art, or even games.
"I use my imagination every day when I'm making art," he tells the students. "Where does your imagination live? In your brain, that's where your ideas live, isn't it? That's where your creativity is. So being creative is being able to use your mind and to visualize ideas."
Marlow says he gets some of his best ideas while just playing around, so the recycled creations he shares with the students give kids a chance to get high-octane fun and creative stimulation from low-tech toys. There's a flute made of a soda straw with finger holes punched along it. There's a toss toy made of the top of a plastic bottle, a ball of aluminum foil and a string. There's even a tiny plastic jumping frog.
"Oh, that's cool!" a student declares.
Marlow remembers the day years ago when he realized how much plastic was destined to end up in America's landfills. It was the early 70s, and recycling didn't get the publicity then that it gets today.
"I saw a disposable lighter. And I remember the first time I saw it, I looked at the bottom of it trying to figure out where you put the fuel into it. And somebody said, 'Oh, that's a disposable thing.' And I couldn't get my head around the idea that something that looked like you could use it over and over and over again was something that was being thrown away. It didn't seem right to me," Marlow said.
Even when Marlow started recycling in the early 1990s, he saw something more than trash in the stuff he was taking to Columbus' communal recycling bins.
"I kept looking at this stuff and thinking, Wow, this is incredible material. I think maybe as an artist I should try to maybe reuse some of these materials rather than just recycle them," Marlow said.
At that time, Marlow was teaching art to school kids with Days of Creation: Arts for Kids and started developing workshops on making art with recyclables. He created a week-long school residency program on turning trash into treasure and, with the help of the Greater Columbus Arts Council's Artists-in-the-Schools program, has been brining it to local schools since 1994.
The time is ripe for Marlow's work with recyclables. Last spring the International Artexpo New York issued the Global Green Artist Challenge, a call for artists to use eco-friendly materials in creating artwork on environmental themes. A search on etsy.com, a New York City-based virtual marketplace for creative work, turns up tens of thousands of products made from recycled materials by artists around the globe.
On the West Coast, Vancouver, Canada, was home to its fourth annual Recycled Arts Festival last month, where 75 vendors drew a crowd of nearly 15,000. Since 1999, Portland, Oregon's Trillium Artisans has helped artists build careers from selling items made from recycled materials. Like Marlow, Trillium Artisans' Christine Claringbold also teaches school kids how to transform recycled materials into art. She has no doubt students understand that creativity can be good for the environment as well as for the soul.
"I think anytime you can bring art into the picture, it makes it fun," Claringbold said. "The kids get it, and they understand that recycling is important."
Fun also seems to rule the day at the Wickliffe School. Students burst out laughing as Marlow unveils his plastic sunglasses—a strip cut from the bottle's side with a nick cut out for a nose. Maybe the reason the sunglasses go over so well with the students is because a student came up with the idea.
"I get ideas from them all the time," Marlow said. "The kids come up with wonderful ideas, and I'm just lucky enough to be there at the time of that discovery."
Marlow says he tries to teach students that the fun of thinking creatively to solve problems and protecting the environment by recycling are equally important.
"They get a chance to see how by using the creative process we can deal with stuff that's really littering the landscape and filling up the landfills." Marlow said.
At the end of class, Marlow wants to find out what ideas the students came up with. One student came up with a bug catcher, complete with air vents and a security system to keep the critter inside.
But students take away more than just toys.
"I learned that you can just take a two-liter bottle and you can turn it into, like, almost anything," said student Ben Starker.
And "anything" includes any number of ideas.
© Copyright 2010, WOSU210
