packaging as content

February 23, 2009

Tom Fruin

Another “discarded packaging as creative medium” story—(thanks to Daniel Wangelin’s comment)—similar to the previous post about El Anatsui. (And again I’m quoting an article by Gregg Cook…)

Tom Fruin noticed the postage-stamp-sized plastic baggies in front of his apartment building not long after his move to New York’s Lower East Side, in 1996. The bags had packaged drugs, he realized, but back in Los Angeles, where he grew up, he’d never noticed bags of such colors and patterns and tiny size…. “I was just wasting so much time looking at them that I started picking them up.”

Over the following months, he collected dozens, and he pushed them around on a table in his Brooklyn studio, arranging them side by side, sliding them inside one another, certain he had to make something of them, but not sure what. Finally he struck on the idea of stitching them together like patchwork quilts.

Tom Fruin’s bad habits,
Looking for beauty in the detritus of drug culture
Greg Cook, The Boston Phoenix, July 11, 2006

Although we’ve touched on the subject of drug packet branding before—(see Packaging Junk)—I get the feeling we have not yet scratched the surface.

(See a video of Fruin discussing his work, after the fold…)