Skip to main content

Chester County Press

Art? Trash? It's both, as the Trashy Women celebrate creative recycling

04/18/2016 01:27PM ● By J. Chambless

'Dog Face,' a sculpture by Maggie Creshkoff.

By John Chambless
Staff Writer

It's always a treat when the Trashy Women get together, as they have for the past 11 years. The group of women artists recycles and reuses what some people would call trash, and they create endlessly inventive art.

The Wilson Vineyard Gallery in Nottingham is hosting a group show through May 7 that will make you laugh, and then make you want to go home and create something of your own.

Mindy Jarusek turns faucet handles into flowers and buttons into bouquets in her small pieces. Sue Eyet's mobiles are feats of delicate engineering, using a beguiling mix of objects that suggest multiple interpretations. Her “Love With Wall Book” is an assemblage of items you wouldn't otherwise see together – keys, watch parts, Scrabble letters, bobbins and more, all balanced perfectly on a wall-mounted bracket. Her mobiles are also hanging in the winery's tasting room, giving you plenty of time to linger and appreciate her masterful arrangements of tiny things.

Caryn Hetherston has some tribal-inspired necklaces and pendants, and three fascinating sculptures. “Industrial Angel” is a timeless, strange monument using a little doll figure on a pedestal; and “A Dime For Your Thoughts” is a complex, evocative sculpture under a glass dome that combines a mouse's jaw bone, a porcelain doll ear and who knows what else. It's like a steampunk shrine, and unlike anything you'll see anywhere else.

Maggie Creshkoff's rusty angels are always delightful, with somber pottery faces and bodies made of rusted, ragged metal. Only Creshkoff could accidentally run over a helmet liner with her car, look at the shattered results, mount it on a frame and – voila! – it's an odd, dessicated trophy titled “Fish or Foul?” She can also turn a bit of particle board shelving and a few doodads into a whimsical canine profile.

Donna Steck's three-column wall hanging, “Wish You Were Here,” links watercolor scenes that are like abstract postcards. But Steck's high points are “Recorded History,” a wall hanging made of interwoven cassette tape and microfilm; as well as “Mixed Tape,” a weaving of different shades of brown cassette tape that looks like a textile. Both are prime examples of taking something useless – does anyone have a use for old cassettes? – and making something entirely unexpected.

Jo Pinder's paintings are, at first glance, abstract stripes and dashes. But when you look at them as landscapes, their scale opens up and you can see cartoonish mountain ranges or trees, overlapping into the distance.

Aside from being fun and thought-provoking, the show is a celebration of making art, not expanding a landfill. Don't miss it.

The Wilson Vineyard Gallery is at 4374 Forge Road in Nottingham. Visit www.wilsonvineyard.com.

To contact Staff Writer John Chambless, email [email protected].