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Nashville, Tennessee

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Summer Guide
May 17, 2007


Another Woman’s Treasure
DIY sculpture may be junk, but it’s not a waste

by Elizabeth Ulrich

When it comes to found-object art, two elements are key: a big load of random trash and something to hold it all together. Seems simple enough. But those who are not blessed with garages—or the means to store junk—will soon find that quality waste is hard to come by.

One guy at Metro’s East Recycling Center put it this way: “This is a drop-off site. You can’t take any of this stuff away. But you can look at it if you want.” Official word from Metro is that looking is all that’s allowed—scavenging is illegal in Tennessee because rural counties have “really suffered from employees and other people taking aluminum cans.”

Photo

But good-looking garbage is essential to forming outdoor art that doesn’t look like dogs tore into a bag of trash on your lawn. That’s where friends like Irene Ritter come in handy. She’s a sculptor who’s worked in stone for nearly a decade. In the land of amateur junk art, her access to a mass of “junk shit” is far more indispensable than her stone-carving skills. Her Green Hills neighborhood is all fluting birds and perfectly manicured lawns, but her neighbors, Ginger and the Colonel, have sheds chock full of the kind of refuse no one would ever miss.

Armed with said junk, Ritter had a clear vision: to create the most beautiful, 6-foot-plus goddess of the Third Coast shores the city had ever seen. So she set to work on the infrastructure. It needn’t be a feat of structural engineering, just common sense. If you’re gonna stack it tall, start with a base that won’t topple. The best Ritter could find was a rusty metal stool with four plastic pipes attached at the base for some height. And the four-legged Bettie was born.

Enter the fun part. “Get a cooler full of beer, get some friends over and just start creating,” Ritter says. From one perky tea-kettle-topped breast to a bucket head and a skirt fashioned from window screen, Ritter ad-libbed as she stacked, stuck and glued. All it took was two tubes of Liquid Nails adhesive, a couple spools of wire and a few strategically placed items of found bling to draw the eye away from this goddess’s shortcomings. Ritter says you’ll know you’re finished when you’re out of materials or beer.

Sure, her grand goddess ended up looking more like a robot in bad drag. But Ritter styled her for less than $10. “No one expects it to be polished or professional,” she says. “There’s no way that creating a piece of junk art is not fun, unless you’re serious about it.”

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