Jenifer Genovesi creates treasure from trash.
Using repurposed items - street signs, soda cans, records, water skis, you name it - this North Chattanooga artist creates pieces that spark the imagination.
"When I was my kids' age, there was a house that was being built down the road from us," she said. "They had a Dumpster full of triangular-cut pieces. My dad said I could build whatever I wanted in his workshop, but I couldn't use anything that plugged in. So that was when I started pulling things out of the trash to build other things."
Genovesi co-chaired the building of the Normal Park Museum Magnet School multi sensory, curriculum oriented playground in 2006. She created a baobab tree of scrap wood, snowshoes, colorful gloves and other unusual items, for the lobby of Calvin Donaldson Elementary. Her work, including the recycled material flowers pictured here, also can be seen around North Chattanooga, including at Good Dog restaurant, Blue Skies and Winder Binder Gallery.
Q: How did you get your garden started?
A: The first time I made a flower out of cans was for a doghouse I'd made for my friend Susan Paden. I didn't have a washer, so I used a bottle cap, and that looked like a little flower, so I made bigger ones. Later, when she opened Good Dog, she asked me to come and do the interior. And we did flowers all up and around the back of the restaurant where the staff was going to work.
The flower work is a smaller, easier-to-carry version of what I've been doing for years, which is making stuff out of stuff other people would throw away.
Q: Were you raised in an environmentally conscious environment?
A: My grandparents made all their Christmas presents for us. My grandfather would jigsaw it out, my grandmother would design it and paint it. Their generation was "waste not, want not," so I grew up hearing that from them. My parents encouraged that, too. My grandmother would quilt. She had a friend who worked at a clothing factory and brought her a bag of cuffs and she made a quilt out of the cuffs. My grandparents had no money, but a lot of creativity. They made cool stuff and I wanted to be like them.
Q: How have you passed this along to your children?
A: They definitely know how to recycle. My younger son, especially, is very enthusiastic about helping me harvest materials. He'll go to the recycling center and find cans with pretty colors for me. I think they enjoy what I've done. They're probably more engineering and musically oriented than visually. Our dining room chairs are covered in old street banners. They live in and among their mother's crazy stuff all the time, though they don't really feel the need to make more of it, I guess. They haven't suffered as a result, I don't think.
Q: So your home reflects your art?
A: It's all art we've gotten at festivals like Four Bridges or other places we've been. Or it's things we made. When we made the upstairs attic into (the boys') bedroom area, we used reclaimed wide pine boards for the floor, so it would look like an old attic floor. The dining room chairs were ones someone had thrown out, so we spray painted them and upholstered them with old banners from the Aquarium. They've had to share space with every project I've been working on.
I'm a full time mom. And then I tinker and play with this other stuff. My full time job is carpooling to and from the boys choir and drum lessons and soccer practice, managing two little dogs in and out of the house all day, clipping coupons.... that's what I do full time. My mother always said she got her work done by 10. I don't do that. I don't even aspire to have the floor clean enough to eat off of. I figure if my dishes are clean, that's good enough. But i look forward to when everything else is done and I can go down to the basement and make crazy things. That's my fun.