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Dryer lint as art, believe it or not
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| Heidi Hooper, an artist from Pennsylvania, creates art with dryer lint. |
By Steve Vaughan
WILLIAMSBURG -- Sometimes art can help overcome life’s difficulties.
That’s the case with Heidi Hooper, 53, an artist from Pennsylvania whose work created from dryer lint will debut at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! on Richmond Road.
Trained as a sculptor at VCU, she made a name for herself with jewelry and costumes created from metal. She also made dolls.
“I was a master costumer. My jewelry was showing in galleries all over, and I was making a pretty good living at that,” she said. “Then I got cancer.”
She’s right-handed and had to have much of the muscle in her right arm removed, leaving the hand too weak to work with metal.
She found her new medium by accident. “When I was very sick with cancer, my mother-in-law was staying with us to take care of me. A lot of people had sent me these multi-colored chenille throws to cheer me up,” she said.
One day the dryer broke down.
“When I went to look there was this Peter Max-colored lump of lint about the size of a puppy on top of the dryer,” Hooper recalled. “Needless to say, the chenille throws weren’t chenille anymore. They were burlap rags. I saved the lint because people had given me these things as gifts and they’d been ruined.”
Later, she was looking for a way to continue her artwork.
“When you’re an artist, you have this monster inside that needs to get out somehow. Then my husband, Michael, reminded me of these pieces I’d done in college out of handmade paper. I tried that, then remembered why I hated handmade paper. Then I thought of the lint.”
That was around 2001.
“The first couple of years, they were horrible,” she laughed. “I was just relying on my own dryer.” Now she gets dryer lint in the mail from all over the country.
“I run a contest on Facebook every year where the person who sends me the best lint and the second-best get pieces of art in the mail. I guess it’s part of the recycling that’s becoming so popular.”
Although her work looks to the eye like painting, it’s actually a kind of sculpture since the lint is placed by hand. “I’ve never really thought of it like that, but it is sculpture,” she said. Just in a softer material.
Want to go? Heidi Hooper will be at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum 3-5 p.m. Thursday, April 7. She usually donates a quarter of the profits to a local “no-kill’ animal shelter.
That’s the case with Heidi Hooper, 53, an artist from Pennsylvania whose work created from dryer lint will debut at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! on Richmond Road.
Trained as a sculptor at VCU, she made a name for herself with jewelry and costumes created from metal. She also made dolls.
“I was a master costumer. My jewelry was showing in galleries all over, and I was making a pretty good living at that,” she said. “Then I got cancer.”
She’s right-handed and had to have much of the muscle in her right arm removed, leaving the hand too weak to work with metal.
She found her new medium by accident. “When I was very sick with cancer, my mother-in-law was staying with us to take care of me. A lot of people had sent me these multi-colored chenille throws to cheer me up,” she said.
One day the dryer broke down.
“When I went to look there was this Peter Max-colored lump of lint about the size of a puppy on top of the dryer,” Hooper recalled. “Needless to say, the chenille throws weren’t chenille anymore. They were burlap rags. I saved the lint because people had given me these things as gifts and they’d been ruined.”
Later, she was looking for a way to continue her artwork.
“When you’re an artist, you have this monster inside that needs to get out somehow. Then my husband, Michael, reminded me of these pieces I’d done in college out of handmade paper. I tried that, then remembered why I hated handmade paper. Then I thought of the lint.”
That was around 2001.
“The first couple of years, they were horrible,” she laughed. “I was just relying on my own dryer.” Now she gets dryer lint in the mail from all over the country.
“I run a contest on Facebook every year where the person who sends me the best lint and the second-best get pieces of art in the mail. I guess it’s part of the recycling that’s becoming so popular.”
Although her work looks to the eye like painting, it’s actually a kind of sculpture since the lint is placed by hand. “I’ve never really thought of it like that, but it is sculpture,” she said. Just in a softer material.
Want to go? Heidi Hooper will be at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum 3-5 p.m. Thursday, April 7. She usually donates a quarter of the profits to a local “no-kill’ animal shelter.
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