Greater L.A.

When a city of a certain magic shunts its detritus to your door, you go and greet it and make something wonderful: exotic music, a mysterious mask, a dress of many colors. That is, if you are Sara Morris, the new artist-in-residence at the San Francisco dump.

Aloft on a windy rise blessed with a panorama of bay and fog and rolling hills and little houses below, Morris’ spacious “studio” is one to covet.

Morris’ objet trouve are delivered, 3,000 tons worth, every morning by a parade of big, blue trucks full of desultory wood, metal and plastic. Furniture and appliances, maps and globes, paints and clothes. At times a box of old family snapshots and yellowed 1950s PG&E; bills--the poignant residue of an extinguished life.

Such is the stuff with which artists-in-residence the past five years have created the Joseph E. Johnson Memorial Garden, where 10,000 visitors a year see paving tiles inlaid with kitchen utensils and an 8-foot teardrop of plastic 2-liter bottles singing a strange, low-whistling wind song.

A maker of masks and puppets, Morris will be found until next spring at what is formally known as the Norcal Waste Systems Inc. Transfer Station. Drawing a stipend of up to $2,000 a month--from a tiny fee assessed every San Franciscan who dutifully pushes the week’s refuse out to the curb--she is making laughing masks and flamboyant dresses and then, maybe, giant chess pieces, perhaps. She says: “I think it will be a real challenge. . . . Not all art has to be beautiful, of course, but something that will really captivate the viewer.”