Recycled Plastic Bag Art

Artist John Dahlsen has created a small collection of Recycled Plastic Bag Art that, in a truly junkmasterly fashion, wrests beauty from, well, trash. He explains: "I have been developing new works in 2003 using recycled plastic bags as the primary medium. This new work is a slight departure from my more recognizable assemblage works in which I used plastics and other detritus collected from the Eastern Australian seaboard. I am with this work, apart from wishing to express obvious environmental messages, particularly interested in the brilliance of the colours and textures available to me in working with this medium. I am constantly surprised to see the variations in these plastics, in fact much like how I am intrigued by the beach found objects I have collected over the years."

Dahlsen also likes to make things like totems, kinda like totem poles, more like towers of junk. And again, he manages to make genuine, unmistakable art out of them. They are what you might call "towering testimonies" to the power of an artistic vision, and the allure of someone who allows himself the fun of playing with junk. His stuff looks like art. His stuff is priced like art. His stuff even won him an opportunity to create a giant junk statue of an Absulut Vodka bottle.

Here's a guy whose success is impressive enough, and materials rubbishy enough, to make you think that even you could make art out of junk. Which, of course, is the whole point.