STYLE : DESIGN : They’re the Tops

For years, Clare Graham has collected mountains of small and insignificant objects normally destined for the dump. It’s not that the 45-year-old former Disneyland art director is a crusading recycler (though he is concerned about the environment). The truth is, he has a passion for turning bottle caps, soda cans and pull tabs-- hundreds of thousands of them --into giant footed pods and colossal Grecian urns.

Growing up in Canada, Graham was an obsessive collector of leaves, rocks, fossils and shells. “My mother and father were always on me to clean up my room,” he recalls, “and one way to do it was to assemble these things into something. My father used to carve duck decoys, so I used to take his decoys and glue rocks all over them.” An artist and his medium were born.

Graham now designs and directs TV extravaganzas like Super Bowl half-time shows and Japanese theme-park openings for a living, but in his spare time he still scours swap meets and garage sales for buttons, dice, swizzle sticks, knitting needles, even rosaries. When his supply of bottle caps from friends proved inadequate, he began making weekly rounds to bars and restaurants. Collecting involves washing (to get rid of sticky soda and the smell of stale beer) and sorting (orangeade caps had the best color; old cork-lined caps, the best shape-retention).

The idea of making Grecian urns out of humble bottle caps was inspired partly by his love of early American Arts and Crafts pottery. His pieces echo those forms as well as more tribal and classical shapes. But Graham, who doesn’t sell his works, also doesn’t consider them art really. (They will be on view at the eighth annual Los Angeles Modernism Show May 12-14 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.)

For him, his assemblages are simply a means of escape: “It’s like meditation. When I am doing something that is mind-numbing in its repetitiveness, it allows me to do these great flights of fancy and escape from the normal sphere of living.”