Thursday Salute to Originals: Turning Deterioration into Colorful Creations
In our neck of the woods, it’s starting to change seasons. Not just from fall to winter, but from “orange barrel season” into the dreaded “pothole season.” It’s bad enough during summer when highways are lined with miles of orange barrels making any kind of travel frustrating. But all the snow, freezing temperatures, salt, and plows that come with the brutal Ohio winters really start to cause some problems. Potholes become craters in the ground, and often, a simple drive into work can seem more like off-roading in the mountains. In short, it’s a pain.
Juliana Santacruz Herrera, in a make-lemonade-out-of-lemons moment, has decided to do something about those unsightly pot holes. Instead of just complaining, she decided to turn them into works of art. Using a variety of yarn, she fills the potholes, following their intricate contours, creating a very fluid and organic installation. The whimsical patterns and colors, combined with the juxtaposition of the hard and soft materials, make these pesky potholes suddenly playful and quirky. Furthermore, the yarn highlights the shape of the pothole, calling attention to an odd beauty that goes widely unnoticed.
Herrera isn’t the only one going along with this idea of creating art from deteriorating infrastructure, though. Jan Vormann also has a similar mindset and uses Legos to “repair” the cracks and fissures in aging buildings. Similar to the potholes, Vormann follows the contours of the crack, and fashions individual Legos to those parameters, even around curves and corners. It is, no doubt, a time consuming endeavor, but the irony that comes from using childhood building blocks to repair actual buildings, makes it worthwhile and all the more interesting.
While were not entirely sure how functional or permanent these installations are, they do offer an interesting view point on things that are usually considered an eyesore. Both Herrera and Vormann add a breath of fresh air into these deteriorating objects, giving them new life and a little bit of spunk along the way.
Image credits: Dornob