A pointed take on street style

Lana SHUTTLEWORTH calls herself a Conehead, but don’t confuse her with the pointy-headed aliens played by Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin on “Saturday Night Live.”

For more than 15 years, this downtown artist has used orange traffic cones as the raw material for her creations. Her work ranges from wall-size landscapes to portraiture to sculptures of animals. Beginning Saturday, Shuttleworth, 38, will exhibit 17 new works in a solo show titled “Cone Migration” at Bandini Art in Culver City. The exhibition (on view through Oct. 20) takes an object that traffic-weary Angelenos know all too well and attempts to reinvent it in purely aesthetic terms.

“I’m trying to get people to look at cones, to think where they come from and where they are going,” explains Shuttleworth in an interview at her studio. “Maybe then they would be able to see their inner beauty.”

Admittedly, this is a rather extreme form of anthropomorphism, but spend some time with Shuttleworth and her work and you find yourself looking at these everyday plastic objects in a whole new way. And, in fact, they do have a life span -- at least for Shuttleworth’s purposes. “I’ve seen lots of cones get run over, and it’s pretty exciting actually,” says the artist. “It means their lives are ending and my role is beginning. When they can’t be used any longer, I feel it’s OK for me to pick them up.”

The markings on injured cones feature prominently in Shuttleworth’s art. For “Will They Encounter Others of Their Kind?”, a 7-foot-tall wall construction that depicts an urban street, the artist used the scarring on her cones to create shadowing. She also used smudges to evoke the faces in a crowd. “I touched up the people’s expressions a little,” she says. “But a lot of it was already there.”

To prepare a cone for use, Shuttleworth uses a box cutter to remove the black base. She then cuts down the center of the cone, forming a rectangular swath of polyvinyl chloride that she can manipulate. Forty cones -- or 200 pounds’ worth -- were used for this exhibition. In addition, Shuttleworth is “releasing” 20 cones into the urban wild as part of the exhibition. The cones carry their own log sheet so they can be tracked around the city.

Where Shuttleworth obtains her cones is a touchy subject. She denies that she collects them from the street, which would be illegal because they belong to the city, but she has picked up the occasional orphan. “Right now on 1st Street, there’s one that’s been stuck in a drainage ditch for three weeks,” she says. “If it’s there Sunday, I’ll take it.”

Shuttleworth describes her work as a “recycling effort.” She says no part of the cone goes to waste, not even the base, which she uses to sculpt figurines of stray pets in homage to the “stray” nature of the cones. (Some are on display.) As a result of her conservation efforts, the artist says, she’s able to subsist comfortably on her current cone supply.

“When I tell people my goal is to recycle, you can see disappointment on their faces,” says Shuttleworth. “They see cones as a commodity, as abundant. I think people really want me go out there and steal them.”

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david.ng@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Cone Migration

Where: Bandini Art, 2635 S. Fairfax Ave, Culver City

When: Saturday to Oct. 20. Open Tuesday

to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Info: (310) 837-6230; www.bandiniart.com