Ritual of Resourcefulness — The Alchemy of the Everyday

In this Grade 9 History of Art project, students channelled the spirit of James Castle, the self-taught artist from rural Idaho who made wonder from waste.

Castle worked with soot, spit, and scraps; our students followed suit, creating artworks entirely from found materials: torn card, toothpaste, Amazon packaging, crushed flowers, lemon peel, coffee, dust, saliva, commercial wrapping, ribbon, wire, and discarded administrative papers.

The results are quiet marvels of invention, resourcefulness, and the compulsion to ‘do the doable’. Some works hum with the warmth of cardboard stained by tea; others fuse wire and ribbon into fragile constructions that seem both accidental and deliberate. Toothpaste sits beside burnt paper. Coffee becomes pigment. Nothing is wasted, and everything carries a trace of the hand.

What began as an exercise in limitation became an exploration of transformation , an inquiry into how imagination survives constraint. These small, improvised works speak of domestic life, attention, and care. They remind us that art does not begin with abundance but with noticing, with turning toward what is already here and asking it to speak.