The Trace

Joel recently returned from a global tour furthering The Wild Life series which currently comprises over 25 ultra large scale animals on 4 continents, built from found and recycled material. He will bring his newest piece to Maker Faire: thetrace

What inspired you to make this project?:
Referring to my sculptural use of primarily found waste and repurposed material – I find that all material carries an energy or a story, and that the stories told by new or factory/industrial/consumer materials are bland and boring by comparison. There are infinite benefits beyond this simple energetic difference. My family comes from low income, and my dad was a woodworker/carpenter. He loved refinishing old furniture, going to yard sales, buying junk, and transforming it. I saw his appreciation for those materials and for these old hardwoods he couldn’t afford to buy new. He knew their value, appreciated their craftsmanship, and put all his energy and love into stripping the paint and those years away. As a kid I always had that waft of furniture stripper in my house, and I guess that sort of sticks around in your brain as an idea.

To build large scale wooden structures, you need really good quality lumber, and massive quantities of it. I had to use creative ways to find these materials, and one of them was scaffolding planks. Giant companies building sky rises have massive amounts of scaffolding in the yards, old wooden planks from a couple decades back that, in their day, were the strongest material available. They were the heartwood without any knots or bows that were waked on for a hundred thousand days by a hundred thousand laborers, sweating for their families and for themselves. All that energy, all those footsteps, are in that wood. Like any envisionist speaking through natural materials, they have a life, an energy, and we embed them with our own thoughts when we work with them. These scaffolding planks have kept thousands of people afloat in the air while they were building massive structures. There’s a magic and a story to each of those boards, what they’ve been through, and what they’ve experienced from a tree to that. All it takes is reaching out to people, and reimagining our materials differently.

Bay Bridge steel is a perfect example. There are thousands upon thousands of scrap steel yards all across California that have comparable steel any of these artists who are now working with Bay Bridge steel could have gotten at any time, but suddenly there’s a piece of history available to make art with. People get it – this isn’t a strange concept! The material has a story, and it goes down to every level. Whether you think it or not, an aluminum can has a story – it came out of our earth. There’s a whole world behind every piece of our waste. We think we value them by recycling them, but we’re just selling off the responsibility of refining it to someone who’s willing to put energy into it. It’s a complex thing and it goes pretty deep. But in a simpler sense, everything has a story.