As a former copy editor and proofreader, Winslow Tuttle is expert at seeing language as both a construction material and a conveyor of meaning. Now, in retirement, she is using the physical bits and pieces of everyday life to do the same.
Her mixed media artworks that layer collage and mosaic tiles over found-object cores comment on technology, fads and throw-away consumerism. Most of all, they form a personal journal. Tuttle chronicles her experiences, from artistic travails to housekeeping habits, in a way that combines humor with an irrepressible sense of the absurd.
Take, for example, the mosaic-framed mirror that hangs in her foyer. Its decorative scheme incorporates the set of 14 dental retainers that Tuttle wore when she had her teeth straightened a few years back. Her on-line blog chronicles how she sent a picture of the mirror to her orthodontist.
“I thought he’d be thrilled,” she wrote. Instead, she never heard from him again.
If Tuttle’s art is not for everyone, she isn’t concerned: she freely admits that she creates it for her own amusement, and has no particular inclination to publicly show or sell it.
“I’m actually very shy, so I may overcompensate a little, but I think that reticence extends pretty deep. And yet I love it when people come over and they start laughing when they look at my stuff. I really get a kick out of that,” she says.
Tuttle ‘s first artistic impulse was sparked about 10 years ago, when she decided that she needed to do something about a dreary expanse of wall in her house in Washington, DC. She toyed with the idea of finding a student from the Corcoran School of the Arts to enhance the wall with a mural, but a trip to Spain intervened. In Barcelona she saw the Park Güell, an architectural fantasy designed by the Catalonian architect Antoni Gaudi. Executed in the early years of the 20th century, the park’s architectural elements – an aggregation of turrets, spires, arches, columns and domes from classical Greek, medieval European and Near Eastern traditions – are enhanced by sparkling ceramic, stone and glass mosaics.
The mosaic work was “surprisingly rough-looking, but the impact was astounding,” says Tuttle.
And while her first impression may have been admiration, her second thought was “I can do that.” When she got home she started “gluing things to things” around the house. Some of her first projects involved the aesthetic possibilities of computer keyboards. Then a waffle maker, a steam iron and a boot from a pair she decided wasn’t her style also got the mosaic treatment.
The ugly wall remained unadorned, however. Tuttle never did get around to doing something about it.
Tuttle began to use keyboards as canvases because “all I could see was this technological junk, and I thought, ‘what are we going to do with all of this stuff?’” It wasn’t hard to find expendable boards for her art.
“I just asked around, and people would say, ‘Yeah, we’ve got 200 we don’t know what to do with.’ People were just bringing me boxes of computer keyboards.”
She points out an artwork she calls “I Quit.” The board’s normal complement of keys (a tad over 100) has been augmented with an extra 150 keys glued to every available space including top and sides with eye-crossing complexity.
“And this one is “Baby’s First Keyboard,” Tuttle says of the one whose keys sport the type of plastic alphabet beads that more commonly adorn an infant’s wrist.
Nearby, a waffle iron, bespangled inside and out with tiny mirrors, spells out its title in lettered tiles arranged between the bumps of its cooking surface: “Why Can’t You Just Make Waffles Like a Normal Person?”
As with the computer keyboards, Yankee thrift inspired the artworks that began life as ordinary household appliances. Instead of junking them when they outlived their usefulness, Tuttle turned them into art. While most of the objects she uses come from her own kitchen shelves and closets, she is not averse to up-cycling other people’s cast-offs.
Rescued from resale shops, Tuttle’s continuing series of decorated wooden chairs now lounge about her house like eccentric relatives on an extended visit. An elegant black number with curvy legs has a grouted mosaic tile seat that mimics the scalloped apron of a French maid. Its two front feet rest, appropriately enough, on a pair of strappy black pumps.
And then there is the chair positioned in its own spot-lit niche facing the front door. With its unyielding back and sturdy, no-nonsense design, the chair looks like it might once have occupied a middle school principal’s waiting room. Collaged across its back the words, “Make Yourself at Home,” belie the bed of nails that carpets its seat.
Underscoring the message of dubious welcome, the chair is further ornamented by glued-on cardboard disks printed with green skulls or eight balls. Tuttle found a bag of hundreds of the disks at a thrift shop. Once known as “pogs,” the disks are artifacts of a mid-1990s children’s game whose popularity was as fervid as it was brief. Today the demand for pogs is on a par with used computer keyboards: perfect for Tuttle’s penchant to repurpose.
“I was going to be a writer until I realized that I really didn’t like writing,” says Tuttle, who grew up in a household where writing was the family’s bread and butter. Her father, a second generation newspaperman, published The Oneida Daily Dispatch in Tuttle’s hometown. The elder Tuttle expected that one of his three children would take over the business, but none of them stepped forward. Tuttle’s brother is a translator in Paris; her sister is an artist in California.
Tuttle did get into publishing in a back-door kind of way. A child of the back-to-nature movement of the early 1970s (“My life is a total cliché,” she sighs), Tuttle and her husband lived in northern Vermont, where they built their own house and got along without plumbing or electricity. They eventually took what they knew of construction and publishing and started a magazine called “New England Builder.” Though Tuttle and the magazine – as well as the husband – have long since parted ways, the magazine lives on as “The Journal of Light Construction.”
After a subsequent career in copyediting, Tuttle ended up in Vero Beach “through sheer happenstance.” Her parents had retired to Juno Beach, and she wanted to live within easy driving distance of them. “And I needed a strong Unitarian Church,” she says. She found exactly what she wanted here, along with a thriving art community and a slew of thrift stores to supply her with materials.
“I’m inspired by everything. Everything’s an experiment. Sometimes I just want to throw things out, and then I think, ‘Well to heck with it – I’ll just hold onto it.’ ”
A case in point is a grouted mosaic picture that hangs by her bed (the headboard of which is adorned with a tile mosaic).
“This is one of the things that I really ended up hating,” she says of the rather delightful abstract picture. But instead of trashing it for parts she incorporated her critique, via lettered tiles, into the body of the composition.
“I gave it a C-, and all the reasons why,” she says.
A couple of her criticisms include, “Grout color all wrong, and clashes with the blue tiles” and “Good basic concept, but execution sloppy.”
Did making her criticisms a permanent part of the artwork make her like it better?
“Well, it made me tolerate it,” she says. “It reminds me to try harder.”