Face the truth
Rhode Island based artist, Tom Deininger, proves that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure
Q. Tell us about your path into art?
By all accounts I was a peculiar middle child – I was also an undiagnosed dyslexic, but driven to make and create. Always fond of drawing and building things. I loved the outdoors and was intensely interested in the natural world and animals – a dress suit never fit my psyche.
Q. What is the drive behind your junk art?
I’ve always been acutely aware of the environmental and ecological crisis that our consumer culture manifests, but it wasn’t until a summer surf trip around the world that the magnitude of it really started to hit me. I was a trained realist painter looking to push toward abstraction and wrestling with both content and formal concerns. I started mixing found objects with my paint and quickly realised that not only were there plenty of diverse non-recyclable materials around us to create with, they are also one of the many factors contributing to the environmental issues we collectively face – almost serendipitously the ‘medium became the message’.