Su Ertekin-Taner
Words by Su Ertekin-Taner
Artist Wendy Sullivan’s house and barn are full of bins. Unlike the uber-organized parent or the halfway-moved homeowner though, Sullivans bins don’t store the children’s newest baubles or appliances respectively. Her collection of plastic bins are not household treasures at all — and especially don’t lend themselves to the household part of that phrase.
Instead, Sullivan’s bins hold used takeout containers, discarded textiles, nostalgic chunky telephones a couple decades past their prime, straws and chopsticks, computer parts, dismantled musical instruments, rusty tools, Happy Meal toys, and one particular metal fan grill that she adventurously won from the Argyle Forest roadside at a red light. These bins house the tools of Sullivan’s characteristic assemblage style. She calls them her “collection of junk” though the bins are as organized as those of our theoretical uber-organized parent, though most collectors wouldn’t dare categorize their trinkets in this way.
As with any collection of junk, there is this accompanying notion of dormancy (i.e., most collectors choose to display or at least affectionately hoard, not repurpose the collected items),0 and Sullivan indeed has those odd “waiting bins,” or bins whose items she hasn’t gotten around to using. But Sullivan’s collection is active and alert like her mind. (In fact, the artist tells me she’s a perpetual scavenger who has even memorized the bends in the road where objects are bound to have tumbled.) Her collection shifts, transposes and moves according to her latest fixations. It is added to and subtracted from always. Why this subversion of stillness?
Sullivan isn’t a hoarder or displayer — never has been — though, her heaps of stuff convince us she’s falling in that direction. She was always an active repurposer because she wasn’t raised with a cavalier, buy-and-display or use-and-discard approach to material. The bedrock of her childhood relationship to materials was more of a buy-and-intentionally-use principle: “The way I was raised, I grew up, we didn’t have a whole lot and so we learned you make do with what you have, and you made things with what you had. That’s what mom would do,” the artist said, adding that, in 2016, “I became invested in the idea of using something that’s already had a life and giving it another one.”
This now perennial process of repurposing and reworking is an exercise in symbology. The phrase reversal “forgotten but not gone” is the impetus of her assemblage work. Her work makes an enemy out of the word “gone” — the single syllable gripe is commonly uttered by those perpetual customers living in the height of excess.
“We move onto new technology, so we toss that item. Forget about it, but it isn’t gone. We threw it in the trash. It’s out of sight, out of mind, but it’s not gone. It’s still out there somewhere. In a landfill, in someone’s garage because they couldn’t bear to throw it away. They didn’t want to waste it, or it’s in a thrift store because they donated it, but it’s still not gone. Even when it’s in a landfill covered by layers of dirt, it’s still not gone. It’s just forgotten. And we just move on to the next iPhone or the next watch or the next outfit that we bought,” she said. “I really feel like my work, every piece that I make hits that theme of purchasing things and what happens to them later. What happens to them when you’re done with them.”
Sullivan achieves her critique on accumulation by visually emphasizing her own personally accumulated items: She assembles her bin baubles with a focus on shape. Her shape-cognizant art takes inspiration from tramp, matchstick art and sculptor Louise Nevelson’s conceptual pieces. The repetitive quality and gridlike item placement of Sullivan’s art, for example, imitates the matchstick patterned boxes and picture frames of tramp art. And much like Nevelson’s motley association of New York street furniture, Sullivan’s art is washed in black and/or white color to emphasize the structure’s contours: “Suddenly the shapes are the forefront. That’s what I want.”
Though her occasional wood pieces — adorned with keys, nails and other rusted estate sale finds — lack this color wash, they are not incongruous. Instead, it’s the sepia color that harmonizes the piece. “Sometimes, I find a piece…I can’t bear to put white paint on them. The harmony in those comes from sticking to that aged tone,” the artist said.
“Good Hair Night,” one of her most recent pieces, deviates from these usual artistic practices. When Jacksonville’s FemArt organization, a nonprofit committed to exhibiting women artists, commissioned a Sullivan piece for their “Hair” exhibition, the artist was all but stumped. A return to one of her old haunts — the thrift store — reanimated the artist.
“In some of the thrift stores, they have hair extensions. So I thought I could use hair extensions, and I started thinking well you can take the braids and you could make swirls and swirls would be neat and then all of the sudden those swirls in Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” was what I was thinking. And then I realized some hair extensions are real fluffy and look like tufts coming up […] I started thinking I could recreate “The Starry Night” using hair extensions and so I did,” she said.
Although “Good Hair Night” had all the trappings of a signature Sullivan piece — a process-catalyzing thrift store trip and a focus on shape and form — the artist had never reworked a famous piece, just individual items. But after some concept sketching, intense wig wielding and (over)painting the cheeky “The Starry Night” parody emerged.
Since that exhibit in January 2023, Sullivan has been doing what can only be described as what one can expect an assemblage artist to be doing. That is, wistfully watching abandoned car parts pass her car by on the Buckman Bridge, occasionally swinging around bends known for their roadside treasures, hanging around garage and estate sales and, of course, assembling. Assembling, reassembling and shifting in that active, spirited way required of her medium until, she said, “It clicks into place and you’re like, ‘yeah, yeah. This is it. This feeds my soul. This lights up everything.’”
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