Spare Spheres

I’m drawn to heaps of stuff, particularly leftover things that are no longer serving their original purpose and when I saw a box of bike tubes at a local shop I thought some artist could make something beautiful from them. When I learned that butyl rubber isn’t recyclable I realized I had to do it.

With help from Bicycle/Recycle, we collected all the used tubes from bike shops in Austin for six months. With help from friends, we hand cut all the valve stems out and then stapled the tubes into long swaths. In conjunction with Art On The Way who organized dozens of volunteers (and the installation of the piece for the East Austin Studio Tour) who took 12” balls that I had made and wound them into bigger forms. I then spent a week pushing them around a parking lot in the ultimate CrossFit work out; each orb is solid and weighs between 300-500 pounds.