In 2017, after having weight loss surgery, I began thinking about all the foods I had to consume as a result of the surgery. I was eating a lot of yogurt (4 yogurts come in one box,) protein bars (I was buying in bulk and the individual bars are packaged in larger boxes,) and I was drinking approximately 140 oz of liquids a day (that was about 6 tea bags a day – 20 tea bags to a box.)

I started to save every scrap of paper which came with products I bought. I saved everything (except toilet paper and paper towel rolls). I saved the paper that came with medications, I saved the paper tea bags came in, I saved the box the lawnmower came in, the tags on clothes. If it crossed the threshold of my home, I saved it.

Consumerism is an issue I am concern with. The aim of this project was to exhibit the vast amount of post consumer packaging that came into my life. I was overwhelmed with all the waste. It was all over my house: piles of different sizes littered the kitchen, the living room, my office/studio and the garage. My wife was very patient as our house began filling up with recyclables. I decide to repurpose all this packaging into drawing and painting.

Each and every day for a year I tried to keep up with the amount of paper packaging that I was using. If I had 5 empty boxes from the day, I would try to repurpose them with my art and I could not keep up. I was consuming at such a rate it was dumbfounding. In my mind I was multiplying my use to the use of all my neighbors, my town, my state, to the United States, to the globe. Absolutely a crisis.The concerns I have for the environment and for a humane humanity is the backbone of my THROW AWAY PEOPLE.

Decades of “reuse, reduce, recycle” has found its way toward impacting the human condition. People are disposable. They can be replaced by computers or other people. Humans have strength and frailty.

The 500+ piece series looks at how strength can be gained from a ragtag of scraps, forced together to make a structure that supports itself, no matter how clumsy. What I found most interesting is that paper is everywhere, we use it without much thought to where it comes from. I use paper everyday, and I rarely think of forests that are decimated to create paper that i make art on. Nothing has value anymore, the paper is as unimportant as the trees. In a post consumer society everything is replaceable.

These sculptures hope to shed light on the idea of strength vs. frailty: the pieced and patched scraps of human beings wandering aimlessly, whose purpose is to be reused, reduced, and recycled.