“We're a long, long way from home. Home's a long, long way from us.”

by JP @ the Selvedge Yard

Home Sculpted from Found Objects

I have to take my hat off to this guy. There are people in this world who dream and talk– then there are guys like Randy Polumbo who are actually living the dream, and walking the talk. His life may not speak to those of us that dream of master-planned communities, designer goods, & fancy friends– but if you’re someone that can appreciate beauty formed from an artist’s careful eye, a crafter’s honest hand, and a reverence for history, humanity and the planet that came before us– then this may speak to you.

Why keep consuming, creating demand for more disposable products, and adding to our planet’s endless landfills when there are plenty of reusable resources all around us? I need to get off my soapbox and be more like Randy– who bought and expanded a home out of what most people would consider trash.

“In Joshua Tree,” Ms. Magnuson said, “everything gets reconstituted. It’s certainly a place where the concept of outsider art is in, and Randy polishes it to a high sheen.”

Mr. Polumbo arrived in 2004 for a one-month artist’s residency at a ranger’s station in the Joshua Tree National Park. He had been making art out of found items, wind-up mechanisms that he turned into puckish and lovely whirligigs and gizmos.

In the park, he said, “I got interested in how Native Americans made stuff with just sand and fire.” He began casting glass, from bottles and telegraph insulators he found in the desert, into natural shapes: corn, for example, or insect shapes like a mosquito hawk or a cockroach. (Roaches have been a persistent theme for Mr. Polumbo: in the 1980s, when he was attending the Cooper Union, he said, he liked to catch the roaches in his apartment on Avenue D and gold-leaf them.)

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