All About Trash in Rhode Island

Trash to Treasure

A Bristol-based artist crafts painterly sculptures out of plastic waste. By Casey Nilsson

Deininger trims the wing of a barn swallow sculpture.

Tom Deininger’s latest work, at press time, is an aquamarine eye. Done up in pink eyeshadow, black liner and false lashes, the eye appears to hover before a flesh-colored background. But, as you move toward it, the illusion — optical, in more than one sense — unravels into a riot of dolls, mesh and other plastic ephemera projecting several inches off the wall. The toy dolls are positioned in randy ways, but that’s not the uncomfortable part. It’s this shift in perception, so quick and so disconcerting — it’s an eye, no: it’s a jumble of trash — that makes his work linger long after you’ve looked. (@tdeininger. Go on; we’ll wait.)

Deininger’s purpose was born out of an extended backpacking trip. Nearly three decades ago and fresh out of Newport’s Salve Regina University with a degree in art, the artist longed to see the world.

“When I was travelling, the islands in the South Pacific were beginning to embrace consumerism,” he says in a telephone interview from his home in Bristol. “And you think to yourself: Where are they going to put this stuff? So it became a curiosity about our world and what consumerism looks like as it’s farmed out to the rest of the world. These travels woke up my mind to politics and the environment.”

Deininger returned to Rhode Island and continued making art, first with realist painting, then abstracts and, finally, a combination of both that led to the work he’s creating today. The masters — Velazquez; Sargent — could depict an eye in a handful of brush strokes, Deininger says, and the illusion only reveals itself upon close inspection. He found he could create a similar effect with plastic.

“This thing I came upon, it could present a painting challenge, but it could also address these environmental concerns,” he says. “The message and the medium just joined forces.”

He sources plastic from beaches, from the street, from thrift shops and from friends in exchange for art. The items are then sorted at a studio out of a converted cow barn in Tiverton.

Three or four years back, Deininger took a break from art and “retreated to the land,” he says, to create an edible landscape on his Tiverton property. His wife and children love animals so the family got a couple of horses, then took in rescues off the racetracks, plus a few donkeys and pigs. They began inviting the Maher Center — an organization that serves adults with disabilities — to visit as part of a horse therapy program.

“It’s not like we’re a nonprofit; we’re just doing it because we like to do it. It makes us feel good,” he says. “It’s a busy life, it’s a full life. It’s nice.”

Deininger returned to art when a piece he created for the Artists for the Bay fund-raiser — an event he helped establish for Save The Bay — was posted to Instagram and was received with great fanfare. He’d always felt compelled to make art but was uncomfortable marketing himself to potential buyers and gallerists. But, on social media, the people would come to him. Today, he has 98,000 followers, and the engagement energizes him.

“Hopefully it brings them a nice experience. A delight. They can look at it and appreciate the transformation of things that are lined up to make an illusion,” he says. “Maybe they don’t recognize some object and they wonder what it belongs to. Maybe they have an intimate relationship with an object and it triggers a blip in their mind. Maybe they think about a perspective that the whole world is an illusion — kind of a gut thing of the thinness of how we see; how sure of ourselves we can be. Doubt is a beautiful thing.”

Instagram has also earned Deininger a steady trickle of sales, and he seems to relish the paradox of selling garbage that washed up on the beach — artfully arranged, but still — to high-dollar buyers.

“There’s nothing better than to have somebody wealthy put this back on their wall as decoration,” he says. “It’s Rumpelstiltskin. There is this punk-ass bit to it where people are like, ‘Oh, that’s junk’ and, well, I can figure out a way for you to keep all this stuff. It’s taking the junk and selling it back to them for them to consider.”

Despite his feats in the digital realm, Deininger’s eye is still trained on the natural world.

“I’ve been kiteboarding a lot — like, obsessively — and I’ve been watching birds fly,” he says. “I’ve always loved birds but now I’m looking at them. Every single bird is a potential subject matter.”

After staring at the birds long enough, he’s able to manifest the exact scalloping of a cardinal’s feathers or the exact variation of the blue jay’s blue, and all in unrecyclable plastic. His approach — using manufactured materials that’ll linger longer than his subjects — is a “half-baked artist’s solution” to the blight of consumer waste, he says. But, like the art itself, there’s a duality at play.

“I see my collection of little action figures and dolls and toys, and for every toy there’s a conception to it. There’s art in every part of the process, down to the chemicals that make it and the molds to make it,” he says. “Everything we make is just this incredible feat of ingenuity that makes our lives more interesting. It’s inherently not horrible stuff; it’s born out of our creative spirit. But now we have to live with it.”

He continues, “Maybe it’s an excuse for me to look at the world and not be so angry. It’s a celebration and a condemnation of all the material things we live with.” tomdeiningerart.com