My sister Martha makes all sorts of great assemblage art pieces out of various kinds of found objects, scrounged materials, and recycled stuff. Her art is a little hard to describe, but Joseph Cornell's boxes come to mind as a comparison. Here is a little piece she made that I have and love. 
I think the scene in the background and on the back is The Flume, or at least I like to think so. She has a studio in her basement full of great materials for her art, lots of stuff that I covet.
I was walking the dog on a trash night, when I spotted this great old column in front of someone's house. (My dog knows it's trash night, because we go out over and over again - he loves trash night almost as much as I do.) At first I thought it was a log, but as soon as I poked it with my foot, I discovered that it was an old column. It was carved from single piece of wood (so, it was a log, once upon a time). It is about 4 feet high, slightly tapered, with a decorative carving along the top. It has some very old white paint on it, and inside you can see the screw-like carving marks. 
I wonder how old it is? In any case, I think it's just great, and once I get my porch painted later this summer, it will make a great found object decoration. At the end of summer, I'll move it inside.
I dutifully carried it back to their home (with help - thanks!), where I was able to inspect it a bit more carefully than I could out on the dark street. It is very nice. It is a pinkish amber color, with a scalloped edge, and virtually ready to hang (it just needs some wire attached to the back). When I left it with them it was in need of a good cleaning, and perhaps a scraping with a razor blade to remove some relatively recalcitrant dirt that you can see on left. But other than that, it really is a lovely mirror, and I was tempted to drag it all the way home myself. (But it's rather heavy, so the idea of carrying it up to Oxford and then out to Heathrow dissuaded me.) They weren't sure whether they would be able to find a spot for it in their home, but I left it in their care assured that if they couldn't use it they would find someone who could. So, even when I'm away from home, I can still manage to remain true to myself!
I picked them up just because I really liked how they looked, and because right off they struck me as having a certain sculptural quality. For a while, they were just piled up on a table in my living room. I really liked how the orange worked with my greenish blue walls. But I knew that I really wanted to hang them on those blue walls, so after I finally got around to painting my stairwell, I found just the right spot for them under the windows on my landing. 
By then I had already decided that I was going to paint my stair risers a color other than the off-white I use for all my trim and woodwork. So, I hit upon the idea of painting the risers the same orange. I took a brush to J-Kay, where Sam Rudolph (who has been incredibly helpful with many a paint color dilemma) mixed up a quart of paint in that very same orange. The color adds a bit of punch to a color scheme that I sometimes worry heads a little in a conservative direction. 
The morale of this little story is that you can find art in unexpected places!
I only know that I like how it looks, and I figure that sooner or later I'll find just the right use for it. Then I'll be so glad that I dragged it home. It was out in front of a neighbor's house, with their trash. I asked them what they thought it might be, and their best guess was that it was some sort of wine rack. (No way -- it's both way to flimsy to hold a bunch of wine bottles, but, more importantly, the individual slots are much too small.) The wooden knobs are for pulling the middle dowel forward, which slides a small wooden piece towards you, like this: 
A few of the knobs are missing, and one dowel is broken, but these problems will be easy to repair. It stands about 2 1/2 feet high. I think that one of these days it might make a nice plant stand or what my mother always called an "occasional" table. But for now, it is safely stored in a nice, dry corner of my basement, waiting for inspiration to strike. Meanwhile, if you think you know what it might be, do tell!
I just love this lamp, made by Kathy Neustadt, a Boston area artist. It was back in the summer or fall of 2002 (I think), and my sister had put together a show with a group of fellow artists, whose work is related by their passion for working with found and rescued objects. Here's a site of a show they did a while back. Here are their biographies, including Kathy's. Anyway, I went to the opening and there was this lamp. I was there early to help set up, and so I was able to snag it up right away. I had recently adopted my dog, (who is certainly the best thing I ever recovered from the trash, if you can call being abandoned in a back yard being trashed, which certainly strikes me as fair), and I was in a bit of a canine-philic stage of life (which not everyone thinks I have come out of) so I was very excited by the dog tags being used for the fringe. 
Kathy had found them all when she rented a house from a former animal control officer in a small town in New Hampshire. The lamp shade is rescued from something else, and the shade has been fitted to a great old fifties lamp. I've had this lamp for all these years now, and I've always given it pride of place.
