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| The Doll Forum September 2003 - Gail Zimmer |
| The Doll Forum is a Quarterly
Publication and is the only art doll information magazine in Japan. Below is a tranlation of the article on Janet Cooper from the September 2003 Edition. |
There is nothing I could say about the recycling of discarded materials into useful or decorative objects that has not been said more eloquently in the catalog that was prepared for "Recycled, Re-Seen; Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap," an exhibition organized by the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1996. Which then traveled to other cities.
You won't find her name in the index to the catalog, but Janet Cooper, ex-proprietor of Bottle Cap Jewelry, had three pieces in the exhibition - "Bottle Cap Backpack," "Bottle Cap Suspenders" and "Bottle Cap Vest."
Janet is proof that you don't have to be poor to make art from "post-industrial junk." You don't have to live in a third or fourth world country where new materials are expensive or unavailable, and you don't have to be uneducated and without job skills.
She is American. She has a degree in sociology. She was trained as a potter at the well-regarded Greenwich House in New York, where she has also taught, and was inspired by Japanese potters to make beautiful vessels and sculptures in clay.
 So,
how did she move from the rarified world of art ceramics to the world of
flea markets? She doesn't say exactly why, but she began to find the objects
sold at flea markets "visually more exciting." She even prepared
a flea market made of clay for an exhibition at Greenwich House in 1998
And then a treasure trove of cork-lined bottle caps from the 1940's and
50's came her way. - not just a few but ONE MILLION!
Soon she had a thriving business and had customers as far away as Korea and Paris and a distributor for her bottle cap jewelry in Tokyo, where her work, including an articulated figurative pin, was featured in a Japanese magazine. Janet wasn't the only artist creating jewelry from vintage bottle caps, but she was one of the most talented and successful. She was an annual exhibitor at Gift Fair in New York, where I first saw her work, but after creating the jewelry from 1986, she sold her business in the late 1990's and moved on. |
 For
one thing, she had been invited to contribute designs for publication in
Bobby Hansson's delightful "The Fine Art of the Tin Can," published
in 1996. This new/old material opened new possibilities for artistic expression.
And as with the bottle caps, she was attracted to the lithographic printing
on the cans, which are actually made from steel with a thin coating of tin
to prevent corrosion.
Now as Janet Cooper Designs, she makes and sells a variety of handcrafted products from recycled tobacco tags, bottle caps, doll parts, fabrics and tin cans and often embellishes them with photocopied faces. You can find examples of her pins, assemblages and doll purses at www.janetcooperdesigns.com. As you will see here and on her Web site, Janet has had a love affair with dolls and the figurative. She says she would like to create art that is more abstract but admits she can't abandon the doll form! |
 She
has collected antique cloth dolls with lithographed faces and has accumulated
at least 50 handmade dolls from travels in Europe and Mexico in the 1970's.
She has been collecting and making doll purses and will be teaching a workshop
on making a doll purse at Artfest, a creative retreat for alternative artists,
in Port Townsend, Washington in the spring of 2004.
Janet was guest curator of "2nd Time Around: an exhibit of hats and purses from recycled goods" at the Spencertown Academy in New York State during the summer of 2003. Future projects she plans to tackle are life-size figures with clay or plaster heads and fabric bodies, writing a book about pocketbooks made from recycled materials and designing a house with green space and lots of glass. Whether she is an outsider artist or eco-entrepreneur, Janet will continue doing her thing with other people's discarded things. More than 32 billion steel cans are manufactured in North America every year, ensuring her a lifetime's worth of raw materials in food cans alone! |