In the jungle: Architect and artist upcycles junk into tropical critters for Sherman Library & Gardens

One man’s junk is another man’s sloth.

First, Ron Yeo saw discarded beach toys, bent miniblinds, empty coffee canisters, busted vacuum cleaners and lots of bottle caps scattered on the beach or leaning against trash bins. Then he envisioned a fanciful menagerie.

Using the found objects, he created “Jungle Junk Critters,” sculptures that look right at home where they’re now on display — inside the tropical conservatory at Sherman Library & Gardens in Corona del Mar.

Yeo, 86, is a retired Newport Beach architect whose studio on Jasmine Avenue, about half a mile from the botanical gardens, has given way to his found-object art. On his regular walks through the many alleys that give Corona del Mar veins and across East Coast Highway to the beach, he picks up odds and ends that have been thrown out or forgotten: soap jugs, the floppy handles of sand buckets, a snorkel, the caps of water bottles, small home furnishings.

With screws, paint and glue, they have become Fawkes the Phoenix, Red Wind, Electro Bird, Jungle Jim, Sam Sloth and 15 others tucked amid the broad fronds and spiky bromeliads inside the conservatory.

“They fit in naturally,” Yeo said.

A crab with an upturned bucket for a shell is affixed to a bodyboard that floats in the koi pond.

A crane stands on spindly yellow legs — broom handles, perhaps — at the pond’s edge and peers with a neon blue and green snorkel face. Its wings are fashioned from white miniblinds snipped into pennant shapes tucked at its side, and a body made from a detergent jug glistens from the humidity.

The serpentine Guardian of the Glades hovers over glossy red anthurium with a pool-noodle body and hinged shark’s-head toy nestled in the frill of a blue sand bucket.

Sam Sloth is closest to the door of the tropical hut. He has a Yuban coffee canister head, googly bottle-cap eyes, TV dinner-tray legs, nails for claws and a shaggy off-white pillow body that mirrors the Spanish moss nearby.

Yeo wanted to be a cartoonist when he was a teenager but wasn’t even the best drawer in his high school cartooning club, he said. He instead followed his artistic tendencies into architecture, where for more than 50 years he designed custom homes and eco-friendly cultural centers such as the Back Bay Science Center and Muth Interpretive Center.

He’s a collector of stuff and would reuse scraps on his building designs, he said.

His mixed-media pieces started with beer, soda and water caps, occasionally with household sundries, such as disposable razors and batteries, arranged into mosaics, mandalas and sometimes animals, typically mounted flat. He has exhibited in Long Beach, Huntington Beach and galleries in Newport Beach.

Yeo met recently with Sherman’s library director, Paul Wormser, to donate some of his papers to the archives when Wormser noticed how tropical his art-packed studio seemed, with its natural cork interior walls. He said Yeo’s sculptures would be perfect for Sherman’s gardens.

Yeo said his critters are like 3-D versions of the cartoons he liked to draw as a kid. They are playful and anthropomorphize the mundane, like compact vacuum cleaners.

Red Wind and Electro Bird used to be utilitarian household gadgets. Dangling from wires, the tapered lines of their debris tanks and handles make aerodynamic heads and necks.

“They make great birds,” Yeo said.

“Jungle Junk Critters” is on display through April 30. Sherman Library & Gardens is at 2647 E. Coast Hwy.

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