Shanti Mathias visits Christchurch institution Creative Junk, where cardboard tubes and curtains can find new lives as artwork made by kids and adults alike.
When I walk into Creative Junk, I don’t know where to look first. Should I examine the dragon hanging from the ceiling? An intriguing aisle filled with empty containers, from Milo tins to CD cases? The piles of old craft books? Variously sized cardboard tubes?
Every niche in this dusty-smelling warehouse, in the industrial area of Addington in central Christchurch, is packed with stuff. And it’s nearly all recycled: Creative Junk is a rejoinder to the idea that craft and art are expensive hobbies to be perused in upscale fabric stores and art shops. Instead, this 43-year-old community institution gathers unwanted supplies, mostly from businesses but also from the general public, and sorts them to find a new life in great art. Sometimes that art is hats or CD sculptures made by preschoolers; other times, it’s crafted by adults and displayed in artist studios.
“It started off about cost effectiveness,” says Christine Gayton, who has been Creative Junk’s manager for the last 20 years. “People wanted a cheaper way to get resources for early childhood centres.” They started knocking on the doors of local businesses, keen for cardboard, fabric, paper, labels – anything destined for the dump that could be used by kids to make and play. A garage filled up, then a prefab; 16 years ago, Creative Junk moved to its current location in Addington. “We still don’t have enough space!” Gayton says.
Gayton’s office is cluttered with decades of making; a milk-bottle-top sculpture is draped over a noticeboard, and a Christmas tree ornament made from a cone that held yarn is perched on the windowsill. As we talk, regular volunteers pop in, looking for tasks. “There’s lots of dealing with different personalities,” she says.
A young man has been volunteering for the last nine years, just for two hours a week; he started while still at school, which disabled young people can attend until age 21. After leaving school, he’s kept coming in, helping to sort through the chaos of the warehouse so it stays usable. Gayton has set another volunteer, who has autism, up with some cardboard boxes to unfold; a predictable task that he likes. Yet another volunteer, an older retired woman, comes in several days a week. “It’s all the little bits that help, that keep things functioning.” Creative Junk has also worked with MSD to pay young people needing work experience – most of whom were able to find full time jobs afterwards, which Gayton is proud of.
Instead of pricing items individually, the cost is set by volume, with a small bag costing $13 and a large bag $16. Members, who might be teachers or families, get cheaper prices. “At a lot of craft stores, things can be quite expensive, even if you just want a few things,” Gayton says. “But here it’s quite different – we do have some of the same things as Spotlight, because people bring it in, but we get different kinds of stuff as well.”
Like what? Well, an electric manufacturing group used to give them circular grey foam stickers, manufacturing offcuts. “Kids loved that, they love anything that’s sticky – and, oddly, anything that’s a circle.” The supply has ceased since the company moved overseas, but the desire for circles can be satiated with the spheres from roll on deodorant. Estate sales and downsizing elderly people have been a rich trove, too. Gayton laughs, remembering a community member who sent in personal effects when moving to a smaller unit, hoping they would be useful: first her dentures, then her late husband’s artificial hip. “That was definitely one of the most unusual things I’ve seen, I thought ‘what can we do with this?’”
But almost always, there is something you can do with it. “Creative Junk was such a valuable place to gather corrugated card, shoe boxes, fun fur, leather, different textured resources and wallpapers, sound objects – the list was never-ending,” says Gail Carson, who developed resources for blind and low-vision education for years, like tactile books. Now retired, she volunteers at Creative Junk to help keep things tidy and organised.
The unusual variety of supplies stocked at the Creative Junk warehouse is great for creativity, Gayton finds. “Adults sometimes overthink things – but you put stuff in front of kids, and they will have the answers. It’s creative play.” She loves seeing kids’ eyes light up as they see a recycled clock they’ve decorated start ticking again, or switch on a lamp they’ve covered in shiny CDs.
But adults find great potential in the aisles of paper and fabric too. Gayton recently attended the World of Wearable Arts show in Wellington, and was stoked to see a sculpture made out of curtain tape, transformed into structured wings by artist Donna Allfrey. Allfrey heard of Creative Junk 35 years ago, when her kids were little. In 2009 she decided to start submitting creations to WoW. “From cricket pads to beading, I’ve used Creative Junk for the majority of materials for my creations,” she says. The curtain tape creation is her favourite so far.
“It was so brilliant – it could have been in landfill but now it’s on the World of Wearable Arts stage,” Gayton says. I look at the photo on her phone, zoomed in to where the curtain hooks would fit, and feel astonished: when I walked past the row of somewhat-faded curtains earlier, I couldn’t imagine that they could become something so different to their original purpose.
In some ways, the model doesn’t seem that scalable; as much as I can imagine a group of kids going wild with hot glue guns and jam jar lids and sparkles, will these objects eventually return to the landfill? “Maybe it’s going to the dump either way,” Gayton says; this very point has been an issue in funding applications in the past. “People will come in and use it for a few years, but at least it was used in the meantime.”
There’s just too much rubbish to make reusing stuff a single solution to the prevalence of trash. Still, there is interest from elsewhere: Junky Monkeys in Auckland promotes play with secondhand loose items, and a similar, smaller initiative has started on the North Shore in Auckland. Supported by “drips and drabs” of community funding – mostly from the Rātā Foundation and gambling trusts – Gayton has been delighted seeing parents and even grandparents come into Creative Junk, having played with and made things from the centre when they were younger. She loves seeing people wandering mesmerised through the warehouse, discovering the potential in the shelves of eclectic, useful items. “It’s trying to invite that shift in attitude of looking at something not as trash, but as possibilities.”