Finding treasure in trash

For Sarah Dial Primrose, the best treasure can be discovered near the ground.

The mixed media artist has been repurposing found objects and incorporating them into art pieces since childhood.

“To a lot of people, it’s just garbage,” she said. “To me, I think it’s pretty cool.”

Primrose’s upcycled art is currently on display as part of “Rags, Rubbish, and Refuse,” an exhibition running from April 1 to May 8 at the Bayview Cash Store Hub Gallery in conjunction with Whidbey Earth & Ocean Month.

Participating artists have fabricated unique creations using shipping paper, plastic soda bottles, barbed wire, grocery bags, sardine cans, broken jewelry and in one case, an old utility pole.

For the exhibit, Primrose crafted a colorful shrine out of an oblong sardine can, which is adorned with pop tabs, wire, tiny shells and a smashed soda bottle cap. Her other piece on display is a music box, housed within an old candle.

Primrose herself wears an intricate necklace composed of rocks, shells, pop tabs and a medallion made out of a crushed Starbucks cap. She calls it “Beach Party.”

“Rusty stuff to me is like treasures,” she said.

As a child, Primrose accompanied her grandmother, an amateur archeologist, on digs in West Virginia. The coolest thing she ever found was a gold ring, which she gifted to her partner later on in life.

As a teenager working for Tiffany & Co. in New York City, Primrose met jewelry designers Elsa Peretti and Angela Cummings and even let them borrow pieces of her own to study. Peretti ended up making a similar piece, which was popularized by fashion designer Halston. Primrose remains unruffled by the incident.

“They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” she said.

When she moved to Whidbey Island, beachcombing became her favorite activity and she started a beach glass jewelry line in the ‘90s. But her most recent love is rusted metal, which often takes the form of smashed bottle caps.

She’s not afraid to scour the parking lot of the Bayview Cash Store later for more treasures. She spots a rusted scrap of metal, an S-shaped hook and a paper clip, all of which she keeps.

“Everything found is something that can be repurposed,” she said. “In its own way it’s beautiful.”

Many of the other artists participating in “Rags, Rubbish, and Refuse” also rejoice in salvaging what others may see as junk, truly taking the adage “one woman’s trash is another woman’s treasure” to the next level.

“There’s a little bit of a crow scavenger thing that happens,” Karin Bolstad said with a laugh.

During the pandemic, she began drawing portraits of people on the back of paper bags she’d collected from the grocery store. What began as a 30-day challenge stretched into a year.

“When the show was being advertised, I thought that would be a perfect venue to hang them up,” she said.

During the past four years, she has been striving to live a zero-waste lifestyle, which means being mindful about what products she buys and mixing her own egg tempera paints.

Melissa Koch, another artist in the lineup for “Rags, Rubbish, and Refuse,” described her work as “artful activism.” In 2019, she created a trio of “ghost salmon” out of basket weaving caning, fabric from the remnants of old Island Shakespeare Festival costumes, plastic bottle caps and wax.

The ghostly element of the salmon, she explained, is to draw awareness to the fact that the Chinook salmon that the Southern Resident orcas depend upon as a main food source are currently an endangered species.

“It’s just a reminder that we need to act now so they don’t become extinct,” she said.

The ghost salmon, which measure about five feet long, have rotated through several different art exhibits over the years.

Koch has a passion for reusing materials in her art and said she is trying not to overproduce.

“We’re on a dying planet. We’ve overheating and I’m just watching everything dwindling and I just can’t do that,” she said. “I’m being mindful about what I produce, what materials I use, how I spend my time, what I am creating.”

In the ultimate nod to recycling, Diane Leganza’s assemblage piece in the Bayview Cash Store exhibit is aptly titled “Ode to Island Recycling” and contains a rusted slinky, a lantern and metal dragonflies. She and several other artists are heartsick about the business’ recent change in ownership, which eliminated the plethora of scrap metal artists often came searching for.

“It was like going to a little treasure trove of stuff,” she said.

A retired art teacher, Leganza only recently discovered her love of repurposed art. Some items she collected for years before deciding to use them, such as the mouse figurine in “Ode to Island Recycling” that once belonged to the daughter of a Freeland Library employee.

Other items come from faraway places, such as the seed pods in the same piece, which came from a tree in the parking lot of a Taco Bell in Arizona.

“I love it all,” she said. “I have friends that send me stuff. I have a friend who lives in Alaska and goes to the dump and picks up fun stuff for me.”

She added that she tries not to buy new things because “this world has enough stuff.”

“Both my grandkids know, if they’re walking around and see a cool, rusted piece of metal, they pick it up,” she said. “It’s like a treasure for me.”

Artists Stinger Anderson, Jonathan Bartholick, Lianna Gilman, Lynn Harris, Marcy Johnson, Kim Kelzer, John Norris and Michael Scott are also participating in “Rags, Rubbish, and Refuse.”

Photo provided A trio of “ghost salmon” created by Melissa Koch are made of upcycled fabric, plastic, cane and wax.

Photo provided A trio of “ghost salmon” created by Melissa Koch are made of upcycled fabric, plastic, cane and wax.

Photo provided Sarah Dial Primrose crafted this colorful shrine for the exhibit.

Photo provided Melissa Koch hangs one of her ghost salmon in the Bayview Cash Store. The installation is made of upcycled fabric, plastic, cane and wax.

Photo provided Diane Leganza’s “Ode to Island Recycling” is a shrine to the place where artists formerly loved to find metal scraps and other odds and ends to incorporate into their pieces.