Finding Art in Found Objects : Sculptor lets her collections of domestic items take shape

If you didn’t know Karyl Sisson was an artist, you might think she had a fetish for certain household items akin to Imelda Marcos’ obsession for shoes.

Take clothespins. If Sisson admires the shape of one, she will buy it by the hundreds, even thousands. Likewise, she has in her studio dozens of industrial-size spools of zippers, all of the same make and type, and large bags of identical plastic buttons, tape measures and toys.

“Just to find something I like doesn’t do me much good,” said Sisson, 42, with a laugh as she sat in her Beverly Glen Canyon studio behind the house she shares with her husband and son. “I have to find a lot of something.”

Sisson uses the multiples of domestic items to make widely admired, highly personal sculptures and basket forms. She’ll stack hundreds of wooden clothespins, bound together by thin wire, to create a flowing pattern that takes on the shape of a basket. Dozens of cloth tape measures, wound tightly around each other, become cylindrical containers, and the buttons, connected by hairpins, become abstract sculptures that resemble sea urchins. A combination of a variety of these materials is used to make the large floor and hanging sculptures that dominate her studio.

“You look at her works, and it is only upon close study that you realize that it’s made out of clothespins,” said Paul Smith, director emeritus of the American Craft Museum in New York. He chose Sisson’s work to be part of the 1986 exhibit that inaugurated the museum’s new building and more recently included one of her sculptures in a touring exhibition, “Craft Today USA,” that debuted last spring in Paris and is now headed for Warsaw.

“A clothespin is the kind of found object that, if used the wrong way in art, can be simply awful,” he continued. “But to recycle these things in a sensitive way, creating textures and patterns, transforms them. It makes her work personal, serious and special.”

Sisson didn’t start out making art out of household items and notions. She studied in the 1960s at New York University, where her work was strictly two-dimensional. After college she worked for an industrial-design firm.

But her work changed after she moved to Los Angeles in 1972. It all began when she saw the patchwork quilt designs being done by a co-worker at a design studio.

“It got me into fabrics, and that was the first step,” Sisson said. “The second was that I started to go to the swap meets at the Rose Bowl.”

Sisson hit the swap meets with a vengeance, collecting little dolls and other toys “that seemed in some ways to relate to my childhood.” For her, finding objects of interest comes first and later, sometimes much later, she figures out a use for them. The swap meet items eventually ended up in the collage wall hangings she did in the mid-1970s.

While visiting friends in Woodstock, N.Y., she came upon a box of what would become her signature items. “Whenever I go somewhere, friends know I like to go around to see if people are selling antiques and junk,” she said. “But I’m not really an antiques person; I’m a junk person.

“Anyway, I was at a flea market--which is what they call swap meets in the East--when I found a box, maybe 2 inches by 3 inches, and inside were all these miniature clothespins. They were made for children to play dolls with. I just liked them.”

Almost 10 years later, after seeing an exhibit of found tin sculptures by Tony Berlant, she finally figured out what she would do with them. “I went into a drawer and saw all these clothespins and something happened,” she said. “I started to fool around with them, making little structures.”

The first was a simple, boxlike design that she glued together out of clothespins and tape measures. She later unglued it so that the structure could change, depending on how it was held. Sisson now uses no glue or nails in her work, allowing the pieces to take shape more spontaneously as she works on them.

To bind the pieces together, she experimented with telephone wire from a spool she found near a manhole. “I thought it was just what I needed,” Sisson said. “I asked the worker there, and she said I could take it.” The artist now gets her wire from a supplier, but she gets other binding materials--zippers and old tablecloths that she shreds, for example--from her continuing swap meet jaunts.

The structures she made out of the repetition of these everyday materials are not, at least on an obvious level, about home life, Americana or nostalgia. But they do hearken back to her childhood.

“I didn’t grow up sewing or making baskets or anything like that,” she said. “But from early on I had a fascination with patterns. My mom was a buyer for Bonwit Teller, the big department store in New York, for 25 years and sometimes she would take me into work with her on Saturdays.

“I used to wander into the stock room, and I can remember that, in this enormous room, I was fascinated by the racks of clothes, one after another. There was row after row of the same dress, then row after row of another dress, and on and on. I can still see the patterns, the rhythm they made in that room.”

Her experiments with unorthodox materials continued while she went to graduate school in the early 1980s at UCLA, where her teachers urged her to think big. “One time we were having a seminar in one room when from another came this clang,” Sisson said with a laugh. “One of my sculptures had grown beyond its limits. The clothespins and everything had come crashing down.”

After scaling her sculptures down to a more manageable size after graduation, Sisson’s work divided more or less into basket-like forms and sculptures. The baskets are the more accessible to viewers.

“They transcend language,” said Laurel Reuter, director of the North Dakota Museum of Art. Reuter included Sisson’s work in the “Frontiers in Fabric” exhibit now touring Asia. “It doesn’t matter which country we show her work in. People look at them and then, as soon as they realize what they are made out of, they always smile.”

But the Sisson baskets are not simply novelties, Reuter continued. “I like them because she is using objects of containment--clothespins and zippers--to create containers that could not possibly be used to contain anything but the idea of containment.”

The flowing wall and floor sculptures are, for Sisson, much more personal works. Like the baskets, they make use of the clothespins and other household items. But they are less calculated and more expressive, she believes.

“I think they talk about interior-exterior issues,” she said, “about how the exterior might reveal or conceal something about the interior and how there might be pieces of ourselves that we don’t find particularly attractive.”

Indeed, some of the sculptures are, although abstract, about specific issues and events in her life. “They deal with issues that I consider more of the feminine side of me, while I think of the baskets as more masculine. So it’s no surprise the sculptures are more personal.”

Another important difference is that, although there is little commercial interest in the sculptures, the baskets sell. They are available, for prices ranging from $600 to $1,200, at galleries in several cities, including in Santa Fe, N.M., where her work will be part of an upcoming exhibit. (Because she is not represented by a local gallery, she sells her baskets out of her studio.)

“I guess I feel closer to the work on the sculptures, but I’m grateful for the baskets,” she said. “They support the art.”

The baskets have also, to a certain extent, type-cast her. “Years ago, I was showing slides of my work to the owner of a well-known gallery in Northern California,” she said. “He took one look at it and said, ‘Ah, craft.’ ”

One art critic, writing about her sculptures, complained that they “smell too much of a notions counter.”

“Sometimes I think to myself, ‘Maybe I’ll be taken more seriously if I move on to another medium. Maybe I should try some casting or something.’ ” Sisson said. “But that only lasts for a few minutes. I use the materials I use because they say something to me.

“When you get right down to it, it doesn’t matter what my work or anyone else’s work is made out of. It’s the feelings it evokes that is important.”