The Assemblagist

Aunt Lizzie Always Kept Her Money in Her Purse

I’m to the “Frame-​in-​progress” stage for this 3D piece. That means it will need a hang­ing place soon and this is where I usu­ally stall. The photo has been scanned and used many times and the orig­i­nal deserves to be included in a place of honor. The woman is sub­lime, the every-​woman of south­ern roots. I buy pho­tos, black and white pre­ferred, at flea mar­kets and yard sales. Occa­sion­ally I get lucky and find an ebay auc­tion with the old pho­tos but the prices have got­ten out of hand.

The woman in the photo and the coin purse seemed to be united on the shelf as I searched for items to include here. The pic­ture frame, once refin­ished, became copper-​toned and fit in nicely with the rusted wire fence piece.

I bought the dice at a now defunct store down­town, the space now occu­pied by Lone Leaf Gallery. It’s a nice lit­tle shop, Lone Leaf, and when you visit east­ern NC, check it out.

Now that I’ve said a bit about the gallery, it occurs to me that I should high­light, review, all the local art areas.

Dick’s Army

The arm is a refin­ished porce­lain arm taken from a bro­ken fig­urine pur­chased in Far­mville at a Wood­side Antiques Auction.

I’m not sure what to do with the rest of the fig­urine, but I did cover it with gesso as a first step toward re-​purposing. We paid less than $10 for the fig­urines and the inkwell and the gold snack plates. The baby fig­urine sells for around $60 on ebay. hmmmm.… I think it’s creepy looking.

The coin purse came from an ebay pur­chase of “kitchen junk drawer” items.

It’s very odd to remem­ber where the parts orig­i­nated. It’s the ulti­mate recy­cling, I think, to take items and Flux Them Into Art. Just like the econ­omy, this piece is in Flux.

The paper pieces inside the bot­tle are from a ledger book some­one used in 1910 for car­pen­try work receipts and the bot­tle sits upon a drawer taken from a bureau (doll house size) my Mom made in the 1980s.

This makes me real­ize how com­pli­cated my 3D pieces truly are. It’s not the end com­po­si­tion any more, it’s the route taken to arrive. The jour­ney AND the des­ti­na­tion in art.

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