The Art of Reuse
Photo by Jackie Ricciardi
The Art of Reuse
CFA Sculpture class creates wearable, sustainable art from cardboard
This article and video originally published by BU Today on May 29, 2024. Article by Jay Kimball and Sophie Yarin.
In the video above, Jeffrey Nowlin, a CFA lecturer of art, talks about how the students in his Foundation Sculpture class gain an appreciation for using found materials—in this case, cardboard—to create wearable sculptures. The project also teaches them a valuable lesson about creative reuse and sustainability.
One of the main takeaways of Jeffrey Nowlin’s undergraduate Foundation Sculpture class is that artists must make sure to cultivate a keen sense of observation. And one of the biggest observations Nowlin (CFA’10), a College of Fine Arts lecturer in art, has made during his years at BU is that there’s a lot of cardboard lying around.
“We just accumulate so much of it on campus,” he says. “You could really make anything with it, because it’s a very flexible, versatile material.”
In 2020, when Nowlin introduced a cardboard sculpting project to the Foundation curriculum, it was not only intended to help students understand that they “can make sculpture from anything”—it also taught a few other valuable lessons, such as how to think creatively and economically about the materials they use.
Another lesson, he says, is “to highlight how much stuff we have as a society, and how much ends up going into our waste stream. Where are the opportunities to disrupt that stream of waste, and what can we do as individuals to reuse or rethink what we might have otherwise thrown out?”
In the years since he introduced the cardboard project, Nowlin’s students have sculpted reliefs, or three-dimensional pictorials, where sculpted figures remain attached to a two-dimensional background; they’ve also recreated everyday objects, like oversize cameras and telephones, as well as busts of heads.
To source their cardboard, the class is asked to put their budding observational skills to the test by keeping an eye out for promising materials around campus. They’ve also worked with BU’s Office of Sustainability to procure larger pieces from around the Charles River Campus. In March, the class went on a quick field trip down Comm Ave to the University’s mixed recycling sorting area at 120 Ashford Street to rescue carts of the stuff.
This past semester’s final project was a group effort: small teams of students were tasked with creating a wearable cardboard sculpture that conveys their social and political values. In their makeshift atelier, the fledgeling sculptors created pieces that range from highly ornamented couture, decked out in cardboard flowers and feathers, to more stark, direct works with overt messages of environmentalism.
My hope is that students leave the class knowing that they have a ton of material to work with, and that they can also be more mindful about their impact on the environment and carry that message forward in their art-making.
In the course “there’s usually some kind of public art or monument project,” Nowlin says. “This semester, we [were] working with wearable art, because what’s more public-facing than something that we wear on our bodies?”
Nowlin’s own experience with upcycled unconventional material is extensive: in his gallery work, he frequently incorporates found objects—like bottle caps, jam jars, and pill bottles—into skeins of woven and embroidered fiber. His sculptures and those of his Foundation Sculpture students are meant to force the viewer to think beyond the boundaries of traditional sculpting materials like clay, wire, and marble, when they consider three-dimensional art.
“My hope is that students leave the class knowing that they have a ton of material to work with,” he says, “and that they can also be more mindful about their impact on the environment and carry that message forward in their art-making.”