Last semester, I saw an art exhibition at the ICA by Cecilia Vicuña called About to Happen. She’s an artist, human rights activist, poet, and filmmaker from Chile. The exhibition featured her precarios, which are sculptures created through “waste” materials found outside, such as sand, stone, glass, shells, plastic, debris, etc. I found it amazing that she was able to create beautiful sculptures with strong messages behind them from materials that many would consider trash. The exhibition definitely pushed my view of what materials can be used in artwork, and what artwork could be in general.
You can check out the exhibition here: https://icaphila.org/exhibitions/cecilia-vicuna-about-to-happen/, and you can learn more about Cecilia Vicuña here: http://www.ceciliavicuna.com
I am glad you went to that exhibit! There is an artist who I know of that does something similar. He is named Yuji Agematsu who makes a daily sculpture from the trash he finds. He uses the cellophane wrapper from a cigarette container, and arranges the objects inside. It is a weird, and cool way to document his days. His work was featured at the last Carnegie International show.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/21/marking-time-with-yuji-agematsu
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