Upcycled Statement Art

I wise person once said:

“The aim is not to live forever, but to create something that will”. Chuck Palahnuik

There are a few other key phrases that haunt me at times:

“Can we leave this world a better place than when we entered? “

” If you don’t stand for something, you stand for nothing” Mel Thompson

These thoughts are partly behind why I created a blog called The Compassionate Press last January, with the aim to give voice to the need to build a more compassionate world, story by story, person by person.

I’ve also been thinking about how my art can contribute to creating compelling stories and messages about who we are as people and what we stand for. Another favourite quote is:

“Your home should tell the story of who you are, and be a collection of the things you love”. Nate Berkus

Are we grasping the opportunity to be intentional about what we have on display? What messages do the things we fill our homes with say about us, and what’s important to us?

Then one my piece in my thought puzzle – I’ve been exploring opportunities to upcycle items into art. Do we really need to keep creating and painting on new canvas when the opshops are full of old canvases that no one wants? Or are there options to “beautify with art” things that we regularly discard?

The result:

Introducing “What Do You Stand For” upcycled 3D artwork. These “shoes” that we stand in, symbolically represent what we stand for. Colourful, glossy and unique, they also have a message on the side. I’ve started with “We are one”. We need a global view of individual actions. We are one world, no one person is more important or valuable than another, and its time we start thinking like one. I stand for this.