Everyday Objects in Art

(Written for MSN's New Thinker's Index with Hyundai website, originally published here.)

How artists have brought new thinking to everyday objects. 

Jennifer Maestre

Maestre is a South African-born artist based in Massachusetts who creates eye-catching sculptures made predominantly from pencils. Taking her initial inspiration from sea urchins, Maestre creates her collection of fearsome-looking yet beautiful organic sculptures by cutting up the pencils and stitching and nailing them together.

Mark Khaisman

Ukrainian artist Khaisman is also a fan of using an everyday object as his material. He chooses packing tape, taking it away from its usual home on parcels. He sets it on backlit Plexiglas panels to create surprisingly detailed pictures. Film scenes, actors and the artist’s family and friends have all been reproduced using the familiar brown stuff.

Eric Daigh

Daigh is an American artist who uses push pins to create startlingly accurate portraits of people. He achieves this impressive task by first taking pictures of his subjects, which he manipulates into more pixelated versions. He then transforms the picture into five colours and then maps out the image to recreate it in pins.

Steven J. Backman

Another American artist, Backman uses toothpicks as his chosen material. He makes headlines with his art by reproducing portraits of famous people, such as Prince William and Kate (above). His work originates from a university art assignment for which Backman had to design a cable car from toothpicks and glue.

Jeff Koons

A new wave of artists in the 1980s began creating ‘commodity sculpture’ – art from commercially mass-produced items. One of these was American artist Koons, who made his name reproducing everyday objects in high concept manners. His first venture was a series of sculptures that celebrated the vacuum cleaner, such as this 1986 piece (above).

Trash Art

Due to the ease with which materials can be found for this type of art, a sub-genre developed known as trash art, using items people had thrown away. German artist H. A. Schult, a student of Beuys, is known for his work in this genre. His installation ‘Trash People’ (above) - a thousand life-size human figures made from rubbish – has travelled the world since 1996.

Damien Hirst

British artist Hirst took the idea of found ‘objects’ to a controversial extreme, using dead animals to create some of his signature works, most notably a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde. His piece ‘Hymn’ (above) is only a little less gruesome, turning his son Connor’s 14-inch toy anatomy set into a 20-foot, six-ton sculpture.

Tracey Emin

Also making headlines in the 1990s was fellow Brit Emin with her work entitled ‘My Bed’ – an installation of her actual bed, including sweat-stained sheets, her underwear and empty bottles. It failed to win the Turner Prize, but became the most notorious nominee for making people question whether it was art and what art actually is.

Sarah Lucas

Lucas is another controversial British artist to have emerged in the 1990s. She started out using furniture to represent the human body, creating pieces that were humorous and often lewd. Later, cigarettes became her chosen material, using them to create pieces such as her reproduction of Christ on the cross and 2004’s ‘Pigs Elation’ (above).

Kevin Van Aelst

New York-born Van Aelst uses a wide variety of objects we find around us to create a diverse collection of artwork. From his transformation of a roll of tape into an angry, shark-infested sea to his map of the world carved in an apple, Van Aelst’s art shows “that the minutiae all around us are capable of communicating much larger ideas.”

Jerry Ross Barrish

San Francisco sculptor Barrish gets his materials from the beach outside his house, or any place he finds plastic junk lying around. Previously a filmmaker, he began sculpting from junk after deciding to make a Christmas tree out of rubbish on the beach. He’s now a well-renowned artist with works in a number of art museums around the world.

Brian Dettmer

American artists Dettmer has literally carved out a name for himself by taking existing media – books, maps, record albums, cassettes and more – and creating intricate and detailed sculptures from them. Most famous for his work with books, he starts cutting into them without any pre-planning, stabilising the remaining paper with varnish.

Shalene Valenzuela

Using a method called slip-casting, Californian artist Valenzuela recreates ordinary objects in ceramics, rather than using the object itself. She then paints mid-century retro imagery on her unusal canvas, creating striking, whimsical pieces of work. “I’m inspired by the potential of everyday common objects,” she says.