As heat beat down on a second straight day of the Recycled Arts Festival, Susan Casebeer couldn’t help but fondly reminisce about her first year as a vendor at the event, when it rained so much she and her husband had to go buy a second tent at Costco because theirs was barely holding on.
That day, which was seven years ago, Casebeer had to put her earrings away in suitcases because they were made with paper mache and wouldn’t last in the rain.
“I’d take the rain over this,” Casebeer of Medford, Ore., said Sunday. “I’d take snow.”
Still, even with temperatures reaching 100 degrees, Esther Short Park was packed early Sunday morning for the 12th annual Recycled Arts Festival. Casebeer said the turnout was solid Saturday morning, and as temperatures rose in the afternoon, the crowd started to thin out.
June Wildash of Vancouver noticed a similar trend starting on Sunday, when she had a steady crowd at her booth filled with traditional folk art. She thought the heat might work in her benefit.
“I might’ve gotten some sympathy purchases,” Wildash said.
It was her third year as a vendor, although she came as a visitor years before getting a booth. Wildash said she likes the variety of the work by different artists.
“There are so many different ways to recycle items, and seeing how everyone interprets it differently is really cool,” she said.
For Kandyse Whitney of Blue Fox Glass in Portland, recycling meant taking a broken display case and turning it into dishes and pendants. When the display case at a co-op broke, Whitney took home the tiny pieces and started playing around. She put some of the larger shards down and filled in the rest with smaller pieces, creating a mold to then put in a kiln and fuse everything together.
“This was my first time using recycled material,” she said. “It uses a different heating temperature. It’s a lot higher than the fuse-able glass I normally work with.”
Recycled arts weren’t limited to the vendors. Rhys Thomas of Portland marched around the park Sunday wearing Flora, his nine-foot tall backpack puppet. Flora, a large plant with a rose for a head, was made with recycled pool noodles, sleeping pad pieces and a dress from Goodwill.
Thomas was a hit Sunday morning, as countless people stopped him for a photo or snapped one while he danced by. Thomas spent part of his morning walking with MARACATUpdx, a community group from Portland which performs Brazilian music. They accompanied the Procession of the Species, a parade where kids and volunteers put on homemade animal masks and march around the festival.
Thomas said the event is inspiring, especially since he’s an artist who looks to use recycled material for, at least partially, financial reasons.
“It’s cheap material,” he said. “It’s really important as an artist. I don’t want to spend thousands to make something. I want to spend tens.”
Casebeer said the Recycled Arts Festival is her favorite festival to attend, adding she went to 11 last year, and that’s because of that inspirational spirit.
“Everything holds value and shouldn’t just be discarded,” she said. “That’s the message of the event.”
