Ana Finel Honigman: Do you intend your work as an criticism of cultural or personal wastefulness?

Phoebe Washburn: People frequently ask me about the political connotations of using recycled materials. While I recognize the environmentalist aspect of the work; my choice in materials is mostly guided by convenience. I tend to use materials that I can easily collect and carry to my studio. What I collect and use is determined by my desire to collapse the division between my time making art and my daily routine.

AFH: Do you scavenge and hoard your materials or collect in bulk?

PW: I rarely plan [ OMIT: “a mission”] to pile everything together at once. I just incrementally build into my routine certain places to stop and collect stuff. I know [insert “I”] could rent a U-haul and drive to a construction site to gather what I need in one trip, but I prefer to only collect armloads of objects at a time.

AFH: Why is that? Is it that taking mass quantities of materials be too similar to shopping?

PW: Not exactly, but the actual accumulation of my materials is part of the process. I consider the start of the piece to be when I start to develop my routine of gathering materials.

AFH: Do you set out to hunt down particular things, such as dozens of discarded #2 pencils, or do you just amass collections of random objects and use them once you feel you have developed a project in mind?

PW: I start when I see something that intrigues me. I accumulate materials slowly and prefer not to inundate my studio with a huge amount of materials gathered off the street.

AFH: What intrigues you about an object that other people ignore?

PW: I select objects that have already been used, already been worn, already been marked and already been discarded because then they are already in the state I want them to be. They are what they are already. It cuts down on the decision-making process for me.

AFH: Do you have a pre-determined idea of how you want to arrange these objects or do you fit them together like pieces in a puzzle?

PW: Creating an installation where all aspects of the original space work with the inherent properties of the materials and my ideas for their use is [insert “a” ] bit like puzzling the parts together. My sculptures depend a lot on the spaces were they are shown because they often are anchored into the wall but chance is definitely more of a factor in the final product than is any predetermined design. I just let the structures evolve by repeating the same action again and again.The process has a slightly neurotic element in that it involves adding little behaviour habits. As silly as it sounds, I often feel as if my assistants and I are beavers building a dam. The shapes are less about form than they are about the activity involved in amassing and assembling the forms.

AFH: Because of the D.I.Y accept of your materials and the cheerful colors you often use, some of your pieces remind me of what would happen if a kindergarten were given unlimited time to work on their arts and crafts projects.

PW: It is a very playful process. I feel more comfortable describing what I do as an series of activities rather than notions about form or a process of problem-solving, because defining the work through the action of making it expresses the playfulness more than if I were to just intellectualize the connotations of the finished product.

AFH: If the process is paramount, than why court potential political readings of your work by building structures that resemble organic shapes or cityscapes out of recycled materials?

PW: Often the layered surfaces appear to look topographical or like cities built into a cliff because when I am building, I am inspired by unusual architecture. I am particularly interested in the structure of buildings in shanty-towns that are similarly constructed out of random materials put together in unconventional ways.

AFH: Can you really refer to buildings in shanty-towns as an type of “architecture”, when those buildings are constructed as shelter only out of desperation?

PW: My goal is not to romanticize that use of materials or attach esthetic notions to the things people make out of need but I am drawn to these forms and there is a connection between those structures and my work. In both instances, something vital comes from of the use of materials that were previously discarded and ignored.