20 results for “salvage”
Had a gallery once that loved the work but wanted me to put it all in boxes, under glass, properly framed. As if the whole point was to make it look expensive. I kept saying no, this stuff is supposed to stay dirty. They kept saying buyers want clean. We parted ways. No hard feelings, I think we were both right about our own crowds. What's the thing you refused to change and it cost you the show? Or did you ever give in and regret it?
Built a shadowbox for a guy last spring using his late father's things. Old army patches, a ration book, a pair of worn gloves. He gave me a box of the stuff and said do whatever felt right. It was genuinely moving work, took me two and a half weeks because I kept stopping to just sit with the material. I quoted €350. He didn't even blink. That should've been my first sign. A month later he listed it on one of those auction sites and it went for €1,100. I only know because a friend sent me the listing. Same box, my signature on the back, photographed badly in his kitchen. I'm not even mad, exactly. More embarrassed at myself. The materials were basically free, sure. But the time, the care, the fact that I handled his father's stuff like it mattered. That had a price and I picked the wrong one. He didn't do anything wrong really, he priced the piece at what it was. I just undervalued it first. Still haven't figured out what the lesson is supposed to be. Charge more? Charge less and get out of the resale game entirely? Both feel true. Neither feels like a plan.
A museum in Brno asked for a piece built from scrap. Fine, my medium. I spent three weeks hauling steel from a yard outside the city, cutting, grinding, welding, four days just cleaning rust off plates so the walls of the room didn't look like a crime scene. Materials cost me maybe 4,000 crowns. They were going to pay me 60,000 for the whole thing. I did the math the night before the install and it came out to about 180 crowns an hour before taxes. That's under seven euros. The scrap was free, which means what I was actually charging for was the part the museum thinks is the easy bit. I sent the invoice anyway. Signed it, drove home, opened a beer. The room is good. I'll forget the arithmetic before the room comes down.
Just finished calculating the final tally for that massive piece made from old factory parts I showed a few months back. The raw materials were almost nothing, of course. But then there was the transport from the old Skoda factory site, the specialized welding for hours by that guy Petr who charges by the minute, the custom-built steel frame to hold it all... I looked at the invoice and my first thought was 'Is this a joke?' It came out to 85,000 CZK before I even thought about my own time. Nearly fainted. I ended up telling the buyer 120,000 CZK, and honestly, I still feel like I'm robbing myself.
I've started judging found material by smell before I even look at it. Wood that's been in a damp cellar for twenty years has a particular must that nothing cleans off and nothing fakes. When I walk into a demolition site and catch that, I know the rest of the haul is worth my afternoon. Today a guy in Žižkov called me about an old workshop being torn out. Rotten oak workbench, some lathe parts, a drawer full of bent screwdrivers. I went because the stairwell smelled like my grandfather's garage. Brought home more than I can fit in the studio. The screwdrivers I'll use for years, the bench becomes part of the next room. People think I'm picky about aesthetics. No. I'm picky about history that you can breathe in. You can't fake that with new material, no matter how you treat the surface. The grime has to have earned itself.
My cordless drill has been dead for three years. Not the battery, the drill itself. I keep it on the shelf above the workbench anyway because it was the last thing my father gave me before he died, and also because it makes a good paperweight when the studio window is open and the studio is a wind tunnel. Some mornings I look at it and think I should finally throw it in the pile with the rest of the salvage. Then I remember it's not salvage, it's a relic, and the whole difference between what I make and what I hoard is just whether you call it that. Also it survived the flood in 2002. The flood did not survive the flood. That feels like it should mean something but I haven't figured out what yet.
I was at a salvage yard outside Kladno yesterday, digging through a pile of window frames from a school they tore down in the eighties. The wood still smelled of chalk dust and coal. You can't fake that. You can't buy it. And the whole time I was thinking, this is what I miss when I walk into a brand-new residency studio with white walls and a concrete floor that's never held anything heavier than a thought. There's a kind of life that comes into the work when the materials have already lived. I'm not romanticising poverty. I'm saying the objects carry something. You handle them and your hands know what to do before your head does.
Spent three days welding a knee joint for a figure and only noticed when I went to grind the seam that I'd built it mirror-image. Left leg where the right belonged. Two hundred pounds of steel and I stood there looking at it like it was someone else's work, because it was. Shaped wrong by a man who's done this for thirty years. Cut it apart this morning. Salvaged maybe sixty percent. The rest is scrap. What bothers me isn't the wasted steel, it's that I looked at that thing off and on for three days and my eye told me it was fine. You trust the eye or you don't, and mine lied to me until my hands finally caught it. Makes me wonder what else I've shipped out that I never caught.
I've had galleries treat me like a genius and like furniture, sometimes in the same visit. The one that still gets me: a director in Berlin who spent an hour talking about my work, then asked if I could "deliver something more commercial" for the next show. And separately, I once walked out of a space in Vienna because the owner kept introducing me to people as "the salvage guy" like it was a party trick. So what's yours? The red flag you almost signed anyway, or the moment you just stood up and left? Mine: the Berlin one. I almost said yes because I needed the room. Didn't. No regrets. What's your story?
End of last year a scrappie I've known since the nineties calls me, says come get these tram parts or they go to melt. Old Škoda 8Tr stuff, brake valves, couplers, chassis brackets. Beautifully worn, that smooth worn metal you get from forty years of use. So I went. Paid him in coffee and a bottle of something. Three months now the crate sits in the corner of the studio and I have not touched a single piece. I walk past it every day. My son came by last week and asked what I'm making with it and I told him honestly nothing yet, and he said so why'd you take it, and I said because it existed. That's a lousy answer but I think it's the real one. There's a difference between collecting and hoarding and I've never been fully sure which side of the line I'm on. I tell younger artists salvage is about deciding what gets to be remembered and then I go and rescue things with no plan because I can't stand the thought of them being melted into somebody's new washing machine. One day I'll know what they're for. Or I won't and they'll go to my son, who will also not know, and then it's his problem. That's how the good stuff moves through the world.
A marketing consultant reached out saying she could "systematize my audience growth." I told her I don't have an audience, I have maybe 400 people who care about industrial salvage installations in Prague. She said that's exactly the problem. So for a month I let her try. She had me post on a schedule, use certain words, track when people engaged most. I did it. Numbers went up slightly. Total new people who actually came to a studio visit or wrote something that showed they understood what I'm doing: zero. The thing is my work takes six weeks to build and you walk through it in ten minutes. You can't optimize that. You can't gamify someone standing in a room full of old factory parts and feeling something. I told her I think the disconnect was that my work is slow and her job is to make things fast. She said I was being resistant. She wasn't wrong. But neither was I. I don't know what the proper social media strategy is for work that takes months and asks for patience. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the answer is just keep making the rooms and the people who need to find them eventually will.
There's a salvage yard out past Kolbenova where I've been going for twenty years. The guy who runs it used to be suspicious of me, now he just shrugs when I show up with a flashlight and a crowbar. Yesterday I pulled out three kilograms of brass fittings from a hotel renovation, all tarnished, perfectly useless on their own, and I know exactly where every single one will go in the next room I'm building. What I'm saying is I think half my practice is just having a good eye for what other people have given up on. The other half is knowing how to wait, I've had pieces of scrap sit in the corner for four years before they told me what they wanted to be. My son says I'm running a museum of things nobody wanted. He's not wrong.
Just finished the final invoice for that large mixed-media piece. Spent 3 weeks on it, materials were way more than I budgeted (who knew salvaged lace would get so pricey?), and my hourly rate worked out to something like $8 an hour. I’m almost afraid to raise my prices, but this isn’t sustainable. Feels like I'm stealing from myself.
I've been wrestling with a pile of oak beams salvaged from a demolished factory. They have this immense, solid feel, a density that seems to carry the history of the place. Trying to figure out how to join them for a new piece without losing that inherent gravity. Sometimes the material just sits there, stubbornly itself, and you have to listen very carefully to what it wants to become. Or, more often, what it absolutely will not become.
Okay so I keep this schedule where I'm at the desk by 8, coffee going, big plans, looking so professional. And then without fail somewhere around 11 I hit this wall where everything I've done since breakfast looks like garbage and I'm convinced I should have stayed a Barista forever. Like genuinely considering applying to the café down the street. I've started just planning the crisis into the day. 8-11 is real work, 11-11:30 is me staring at the wall telling myself my last job had a 401k and then I make a second coffee and somehow that fixes my whole brain and I'm fine. Today's wall was the window painting, which is funny because I've done that same window maybe 30 times now. The light this morning was doing something beautiful with the frost on the glass and I completely butchered it. Not even a salvageable butchered, just wrong. And I sat there for a solid ten minutes thinking maybe I've actually never been good at this and everyone's just being nice. Then the second coffee happened and now I'm repainting it with a tiny bit of gamboge in the mix and it's fixing itself. I'm not even sure what the point is. Just that I think the 11am wall is part of the job now. Like my brain does a hard reset and I come back with slightly better hands. Does this happen to anyone else or am I just dramatic??
Walked in yesterday to find my 8 year old with my two best brushes soaking in the kitchen sink, "helping me clean up." She'd used dish soap. The good ones, the ones I actually save for details and don't let anyone touch. They're not ruined-ruined but the ferrules are loose on both and one's already shedding. I know she meant well. I know she was trying to be nice. I also know I said, not even that long ago, please don't touch my brushes. And she looked so proud of herself when she showed me. I got angry, then I felt terrible for getting angry, then I spent half an hour trying to salvage them with a bit of superglue around the metal, which probably made it worse. They're sitting on my desk now and I can't bring myself to throw them out even though I have spares. Anyway if you have a kid who's also "helpful" with your supplies, solidarity. And maybe keep your good stuff somewhere they can't reach. I thought I had. Apparently not. 😅
Needed four more inches of 3/4 round bar to finish a joint and I was out of stock. Stopped the weld, stood there swearing at the bench for a minute. Then I remembered the offcut bucket under the table that I keep meaning to haul to the scrappers. Thirty years of not throwing anything away finally paid for its rent. Dug out a piece of the same stock from some job back in the 90s, cut it, fit it, burned it in. The whole arc felt smoother than it should have. Took a photo of the finished weld to show the guy I apprenticed under. He'd have called me a fool for working with salvaged material, then pointed out where the puddle was off. Anyway. Keep your scraps. The day comes. That offcut bucket is overdue to be emptied. Maybe next week. Probably not.
buyer reached out, wants to return a piece they bought four years ago. not damaged, they just... don't live with it anymore. i don't know why that stings more than a rejection. anyway i took the frame apart today to salvage the glass and the backing board, and the paper still had my pencil notes on the back from when i was working out the composition. little arrows and "no, wrong" scribbled in the corner. i'd forgotten i even did that. it's a strange feeling, holding work you thought was gone. like running into someone you used to love at the grocery store and realizing you still know exactly how they take their coffee. i'm going to sit with it for a few days before i decide if i take it back or not. maybe i'll just keep the frame and let the piece live somewhere else. still deciding.
I walked into a gallery in Vienna once with slides in a folder. This was the nineties, so slides, yes. The owner looked at my work for maybe four seconds and said "we don't do this kind of thing." Fine. I was already leaving when she called me back and asked where I got the steel. We talked about salvage suppliers for forty minutes. Never showed my work there. Still go for coffee when I'm in town. Anybody else ever have a meeting that completely missed the point but ended up being worth something anyway? Tell me the one that went sideways.
Pulled a chunk of Ohio sandstone out of the back of the shed today. Been sitting there since I hauled it off a job in '04. I figured it was stable, had been through a couple winters. Started roughing it out and hit a vein of mica that must have been holding water in. Flew apart right where I needed the mass. Twenty years of waiting and it decides to die in the first hour. Should have trusted my own rule. Never cut stone I haven't seen in the rain. I tell students that every year. Then I go and do the opposite in my own yard. Piece is dead now. Might salvage a small one out of the rubble but nothing like what I planned. I'll go pick up something fresh Monday and start over. That's the job. You spend enough years doing this and you learn the stone is the boss. I keep having to relearn it anyway.