>> Wendy Tremayne lives in Truth or Consequences, N.M., where she is renovating an RV park into a 100% reuse off-grid B&B called Green Acre. One of her projects, Swap-O-Rama-Rama, is a community clothing swap and series of DIY workshops designed to offer people an alternative to consumerism. Check out gaiatreehouse.com and swaporamarama.org.
For more than 50 years, Paula Green has been gathering materials and creating artwork. She forages natural and discarded objects that, through her, find a new and harmonious form as sculpture, furniture, shrines, baskets, and walls for outdoor spaces.
She collects things for their innate beauty or curious nature: minerals, fossils, native artifacts, sticks, rusted objects. Looking beyond the gross material form of things, Green sees “echoes of past lives and uses,” which she preserves with great respect.
What began as creative necessity evolved into resistance to the cultural shifts she observed during the course of her life. During Green’s childhood she discovered that the life she knew, one of seamless creativity and utility, was temporary.
Her experience had been shaped by post-World War I frugality, deeply impressed on her parents and society at the time. As national awareness shifted from war, the veil of her naiveté lifted to expose a system that was already embedded in American culture, one of economic development fueled by production. Green recalls that the expectation of this time was “the consumption of endlessly disposable products.” She chose to resist this process, and continued to forage and create in spite of the fact that her sparing ways were no longer necessary.
Green’s art reveals a great respect for objects and their origins. She has an intuitive sense of “the sweet spot,” a place of reciprocity in which objects remain themselves while still being the subject of transformation. Her intention to preserve the inherent qualities of natural materials comes from her sensitivity to the human compulsion to transform things. Through her own cycles of reuse, she became aware of the economic compulsion to assign value to every rock, and she wonders whether this valuation is “adequate compensation for their appropriation.”
Green’s current work is reminiscent of her utilitarian roots. Through art she expresses her need for self-sufficiency and independence in a society that she finds restrictive rather than empowering. She views her work as a breakaway from the cycle of economic might and consumption. Green creates with a childlike wonder of the natural world, a wonder that has persevered through the maturation of an artist with a broad range of experience and diverse knowledge of tools and materials, a wonder that is the voice expressing her feelings about the world she inhabits.
Now retired and living in the quirky, desert art community in Truth or Consequences, N.M., Green creates for her own enjoyment, free from the work-for-hire construct she believes distances her from the original inspiration to create. ×
Photography by Wendy Tremayne; illustrations by Katie Wilson
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