Recycling old bottle caps is a good way to help the environment, but transforming them into artwork that garners attention from the global art community takes reuse to another level.
Art lovers crammed themselves into 360 Tory Building March 13 to watch Fold Crumple Crush, a documentary about Ghanaian expatriate El Anatsui’s artwork.
The theatre was overflowing with people eager to see how Anatsui takes old, discarded bottle caps and turns them into huge metallic tapestries.
Anatsui and his large team of studio assistants take up to three months to assemble the massive cloth-like pieces of art. The work is painstaking and repetitive to flatten, crumple or crush the bottle caps and connect them in wide strips.
Once a section is complete, Anatsui and his assistants stitch them together in different colour patterns, rearranging them over and over until he is satisfied with the composition.
If he were to make one tapestry on his own, it would take more than three years to complete, according to documentary director Susan Vogel.
In the film, Anatsui describes his vibrant creations as “sculpture that is so free it can change in any way.”
Anatsui was filmed ensuring that each section his assistants assemble can bend and fold every possible way, making the bottle caps flow like cloth.
The folded finished product usually requires four to six people to carry.
Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui depicts the eponymous artist’s creative process, which Vogel said was a somewhat difficult task, despite the fact that they have known each other for years.
Even long-time colleagues who have worked with him at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, have described Anatsui as a mystery.
Although Anatsui’s private life is not for public display, his sculpture tapestries have been showcased from Venice to New York.
“I want to be able to get to that level where [my work] really moves people,” Anatsui said in the documentary.
“I think the most important thing is that one is able to communicate.”
Although the artwork may still need some communication work, Vogel said Anatsui is “in dialogue with his audience all the time.”
Anatsui keeps in touch with his global fan base via email, she added.
The transformation of traditional African wooden sculptures and cultural pieces into more contemporary and metallic works of art has captured the attention of the art world.
Vogel is an African art expert and internationally acclaimed curator. She said Anatsui’s work is cutting edge because it is a marriage between sculpture and paintings.
That combination is what really stood out to PhD student Lina Shoumarova, who was at the documentary screening.
“It was very interesting to me . . . Its paint-like quality for sure. It did remind me of some classical painting techniques, while looking at it,” Shoumarova said.
It’s Anatsui’s new vision that has his massive masterpieces selling for high prices.
His bottle cap tapestries sold for more than $1 million each at an art show in New York last year, Vogel said.
Anatsui’s artwork was most recently displayed for Canadians at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in October 2010.
The display will be touring North America for the next three years.