Artist at Exit 0 Riverblog

Presented for your amusement is the “Wee the People” collection all gathered on my walks along the river at the Falls of the Ohio State Park.  Doing this collections segment of my blog has really brought forth the advanced state of my “disease”…”compulsions” and or “obsessions”.  Most folks ignore this stuff, but it doesn’t belong in the river and so I notice it.

For the most part, the toys in this collection come from well known brands, “Weebles”, “Legos” and many others.  Finding toys always saddens me somewhat…I guess I am that sentimental.  Who knows where this stuff originates?  It makes me think that there are also a lot of unsupervised kids along the river.  My doll image collection alone is amazing and subject for a later post.

The Wee the People Collection is bigger than one box now and includes subsets as well.  Here is the Critter Collection of animal images.  Some are characters from kid’s movies, books, and play sets.  When I was a child I once had a large collection of plastic animals and dinosaurs.  I wondered what happened to all that stuff?  

I especially like the little snail.  I’m surprised that I found that along the riverbank considering the scale of it all.  I have always been good at finding things and have thought that objects have an uncanny way of calling me.  I’ll just be walking along and for whatever reason I’ll look down at that moment and there will be something interesting to pick up.  I always find stuff when I go to the river, which is a big part of the fun.

Lastly, here is the Character Collection.  There is always plenty of potential overlap…which is why I think of all this as the Wee the People Collection.  Maybe I’ll combine it all for the sake of one photographic image?  My favorites here are the Wheelchair Barbie and the vintage ET head.

A couple of detail shots.  I recognize some of this stuff, but not everything.  My two sons do help me out sometimes by identifying objects that are from their pop culture experiences.  No, this isn’t all the junk I have, nor do I pick up everything I encounter…despite what my wife says!  I have incorporated many similar objects in some of the sculptures I have made from river debris.  I’m interested in how the river gives me a cross section of our material culture and how it transforms it a bit over time.