What’s the best thing you’ve found in a skip?
For me it's a dead man’s ties, a mannequin and a book of magic
It’s summer term at college and time for our final project. In June, the first and second year Fine Art students will put on a pop-up exhibition to showcase the work we’ll make in the next three weeks. Fundraising to pay for the venue is in full swing (it’s been bake sales a go-go) as is tapping up any contacts who might be able to provide free drinks for the private view.
But without work, there is no showcase, so ideas are being chased down and we’re all trying to wrestle them into reality. Money is very much an object, not only to exchange for coffer-filling cake, but also to pay for materials. My friend Theo started term by dragging sheets of wood into his studio. He’d found them in a skip and described it to me in artspeak as “non-virgin material”. Which meant it gave a helpful nod to sustainability, but better than that, it was free.
Having a couple of decades on most of my peers means that the catalogue of skips I have known and pillaged is epic. In my previous project, in which I lost my heart to the beauty of snail shells, I used a slither of silky ties lifted from a skip years ago. I made two padded shells with two of the ties as part of my research, glad that I’d finally found a use for them. I’d felt a twinge of shame when I fished them out, along with a useful-looking cigar box, as they were most definitely the leavings of a life, found outside a bungalow that was being cleared. But one dead man’s formalwear is another person’s raw materials.
Or, in the case of George Westren’s art, a vehicle for posthumous acclaim. After the artist’s death two years ago, a neighbour, Alan Warburton, spotted his drawings and paintings bagged up as rubbish (read more about it here) and rescued them. His subsequent tweets went viral, bringing in an audience for Westren’s work, which consisted of intricate op-art designs drawn with felt-tip pens that had been made after he lived through homelessness and addiction, before finding a sanctuary in creativity. How unutterably sad it would have been if Warburton hadn’t been a swift skip-picker, if he hadn’t surfaced with a sheaf of outsider art and brought it in from the cold.
It’s cheering to learn that the artist Richard Woods, who trained as a sculptor and specialises in architectural installations and re-surfacing of structures, has long had a thing for skips.
"When I was a student at The Slade School of Art, most of my raw materials were dragged out of skips and back to the studio for a coat of paint. There is something fabulous about seeing what folks throw away and what you can get for free (I realise this isn’t strictly legal ). I think most of us love to look inside a skip and see if there's anything of interest,” he told Creative Boom in this interview from 2018.
“When a skip appears outside a house that's being renovated then that's the best skip of all because you get to see what's going on inside the house… maybe what type of bathroom tiles or style of sofa the occupants once had.”
I don’t think I’d trust anyone who doesn’t have a good, hard look at the inside of every skip they pass in case there’s something to be salvaged. (I also have a compulsion that means I need to inspect any holes that are being dug, looking for layers of the past and interesting pipes.) “I could make something with that!” is the hunting cry of the skip-looter, optimism sometimes outpacing good sense as a dripping piece of furniture is given a second chance.
I remember being astounded that someone would throw away a mannequin bust, upholstered in floral fabric and without a scratch on it, when I spotted it dumped in a skip near where I live. It was partnered by a full-size male dummy, and some orange Ikea chairs, and I agonised over what to take. The bust lives in my study/studio, wearing a flower crown as a necklace and supporting a papier-mâché mask I made of a green woman ( as opposed to the more traditional green man or pub-sign and church-carving fame). I’m still happy with my choices.
I think my best bit of skip booty, though, was a book that I rescued from a skip at my secondary school. It had been ejected from the library, having been acquired in 1980. Hard-backed and mysterious, because its dust jacket had long departed, The House with no Windows by Allan Jermieson, is an intense book for, I suppose, young adults. It has a 13-year-old protagonist but it’s an extraordinary story of history and magic that is somehow ageless. I found it in my teens, and own it still.
I think about it often - Donna Karen and her parents go to house-sit for a naturalist friend near Hadrian’s Wall. The book’s description of this long, low house where they stay is wonderfully evocative, and is still a place I go to, mentally, if I can’t sleep. The ancient landscape calls to Donna Karen, who responds in a very un-teenage way. There’s a ruined mansion with no windows and a recurring theme of humans pissing about with nature in their worship of progress. Content warning: there is a wizard (and horses) but despite this fantasy trope it’s a remarkably clear-eyed story. I love her slightly feckless artist parents, and the strangeness of the whole book, but in particular the following passage, which is a particularly fine piece of writing about painting.
“As Donna Karen crouched in the rocking bus, with the window wound down and the slipstream blasting into her face and blowing out her hair in a wild black fan, she thought of a painting of her mother’s that hung in the living room of their flat. It was, strange to say, a painting not of a landscape but of an untidy table cluttered with dirty dishes, and squatting incongruously amongst them a bust of Napoleon wearing a felt hat.
Just why the sight of moorland in late autumn made her think of it she could not have said; it was some familiarity of colouring, a link that lay half-hidden somewhere between the gnarled brown of a heather stem and the painted wooden handle of a knife, between the heavy, felty texture of a ridiculous hat and the ancient grey rock of a distant hill, so that as she scanned the sombre sweep of the moor she recognised a tint here, a shade there, that took her mind straight to the painting.
It was a mystery in itself, this painting, for although her mother was a painter, it was not her work. A friend, she said, had given it to her a long time ago. Donna Karen always liked the colours and the feel of the paint - there was no glass in the frame, so you could put your fingers lightly up against the canvas and feel the roughness of the thick oils. She had often seen her mother doing that with a dreamy look on her face.”
The book is next to me - I’m going to read it for comfort again tonight - as I write, working at a desk that I also foraged and love fiercely. But I got that on the side of the road, and that’s a whole other sub-genre of scavenging, which I look forward to dipping into another time. May you rush with a mighty roar towards the skips but before you do, I’m dying to know what you’ve found in the past. Please share your dumpster-diving wins in the comments, so we can all bask in your triumph.
I once saw a toy skip inside a skip. Sadly, it didn't get more matryoshka doll than that.
Loved this! Though I feel like in London you don't need a skip, just the street... I found an incredibly ornate and heavy floor length mirror abandoned on the pavement the day I moved in to my flat. I still have it 10 years on.