I am an artist who creates sculpture and textile art from everyday remnants. If I had not gone to art school, my other dream job would have been an anthropologist or archeologist,though it seems I have become one of Suburbia and City Life with my collections. My husband Erik Gould is the same way and finds inspiration in trash, abandoned shopping carts and couches which he photographs, along with abandoned buildings. On my walks in the last two years I started to see lottery scratch cards everywhere.
Scratch cards have a very colorful, primal palette and I started to pick them up and put them in envelopes, waiting for a project to hit me. I also started to wonder what the people were like who just threw them out of the window. Did they not want a partner to see that they had blown money away literally? Were they mad at themselves and did not want to see the evidence? I often found five at at time, some of them $10.00 apiece. A quick fix gone awry, or was it the fix of gambling itself that mattered?
I created a man's suit from over 1,000 scratch tickets thrown from car windows, found on sidewalks and in yards and bushes, some given to me by friends. It is made up of over $3,500 in gambling losses and was featured in the "Providence Art Windows" on Westminster Street in Providence in the Fall of 2007. It was also featured at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in "Recycled Runway."
I have a larger project where I need your help. I am creating a large, sculptural map of the United States and I need cards from each state where lottery cards are sold. I will list everyone who donates the cards in a future booklet on the project. If you are interested in helping me in my endeavor, please e-mail me at sugarlady@mac.com and I will send you a self-addressed stamped envelope to fill with found scratch cards.
Thank you in advance for your support! I look forward to seeing where the cards come from!
Rebecca Siemering
2 comments:
Rebecca,
In 1997 a collegue mentioned his habit of getting a scratch ticket whenever he went on a business trip, and in all seriousness I asked if he would keep it as a souvenir or scratch it. He informed me that you could not buy a scratch ticket and not scratch it. And I informed him that maybe he couldn't, but I could.
This started my collection of unscratched scratch tickets, which I expanded on every business trip until I left that job in 2001. Some of my coworkers even started bringing me unscratched tickets for the collection, which proved I was not the only one who could buy a scratch ticket and not scratch it.
I was always amused when people looked at the wall of tickets for the first time, realized what it was, and asked "Do you know how much money you could have sitting there?" I would generally reply "About $1 per ticket."
Anyway, those unscratched tickets are in an envelope in my home somewhere. I always wanted them to end up in a museum somehow, and I think it would be great if they were part of your project. Once I find them, I will write you.
Cool idea!
i can start collecting them from the kansas city area. They get abandoned by my home a lot.
very cool stuff, Bec.
i LOVE how you use these things that are thrown out by litter bugs! (liter bugs are my by pet peeve!!!)
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