Rick Phelps
I have been showing and selling the things that I make in churches and bars, schools and hair salons, bathrooms and garage sales, flea markets state fairs, the World Financial Center, restaurants, weddings, parties of all sorts, museums, theaters, store windows, night clubs, diners, a candy store and even galleries.
Now a word about my choice of materials. I was taught by my parents to make stuff out of whatever I could get my hands on: it’s better than spending money on the habit, or sending the stuff to the landfill.
I once read the Chinese word for “paper is the root word for both “civilization” and “bureaucracy”. Our material culture is built at the expense of the lives of countless trees and by the exploitation of peoples, animals and the earth Herself. It hurts! The by-products of a system (any organic organization) are said to be indicative of the system’s health (or lack of ).
Once I was making a set of giant plastic dinosaurs on commission for a steakhouse (I used a lot of plastic back then because the rats and roaches would get into my paper stuff). The thought occurred to me that the plastic that I was using was probably made from fossil fuels. What was I doing? I was recycling dinosaurs! I’ve been told that people think of me when asked “paper or plastic?”
Santa Fe reawakened in me a sensitivity to dry, brittle things and an appreciation of the color brown. In my landscape work I try to heal a lot of scars. In this series I recycle paper, artistic conventions and my neuroses in another effort to order and reassemble my world. A friend likes to tell me that the Buddha said “life is suffering”. Another friend is fond of telling me “he who laughs, lasts!”
Rick Phelps
