Artist Leaves Art Pieces Made From Trash On Streets For People to Cherish

Andy Knowlton is a Daegu-based street artist and a poet. He makes art out of trash and waste and leaves it on the streets for people to take home. His artifacts are made out of trash thus upcycling waste into art.

He has worked on various projects such as The Drunken Poet Project, Red Mailbox Project, The Umbrella Project, The gLove Doctor and many more,  The Phone Booth Camera Project & many more.

Andy Knowlton is a Daegu-based artist who sees artwork and opportunity in trash. His artworks are often interactive and very welcoming. Andy is an American Street Artist and a Poet. He produces and distributes inspiring pieces around Daegu. Sometimes art pieces are placed along with a poem. His street art is later discovered and cherished. He calls it the Drunken Poet Project. Poetry drives Andy’s street art & also gives it meaningful character.

The Umbrella Project is where he collected trashed umbrellas and restored them into art. He paints them with various themes. Later he just passes them on to strangers as a gesture of kindness. With this project many wasted umbrellas were repaired and reused, making way for alternative waste management and an inspiring art movement.

Talking about The gLove Doctor project, Andy said, ” I thought about the many ways we use our hands to express ourselves and communicate and I thought about famous hands in pop culture and art”. ‘The gLove Doctor’ includes artwork made out of gloves. Mostly these gloves were of workers. Andy collects them around large blocks of textile factories near Dalseo-gu in Daegu. He stuffs these gloves with cotton or fiber and upcycles them into funky art installations.

Knowlton is also responsible for many other projects. Interactive project where he gives puzzle pieces to 16 strangers. Only to get them together to solve the puzzles. It was called The Great Big Puzzle Experiment. This experiment enabled many strangers to collaborate together and helped create a sense of comradery amongst them.

Andy is a versatile artist, making videos, or experimental art projects or be it poetry routines, he is always on a quest for unique and experiential activities. In one project he left a disposable camera inside a phone booth. Citizens ended up making pictures of themselves. Later Andy developed the pictures and stuck them back to where they were clicked. This was known as The Phone Booth Camera Project.

Andy is one of the few artists who use trash in their projects. Trash is like a treasure to artists like Andy and they never get enough of it. Another spectrum Andy likes to experiment with is interactivity. Interaction with art brings people together, in this age when technology isolates us, Andy’s art does the exact opposite.