Upcycling, An Exciting And New Art Movement

Published July 28, 2013
Updated November 9, 2023

Guy Laramée

Upcycling Artwork Laramee Cave

Source: Guy Laramee

Based out of Montreal, this next artist draws inspiration from the mountains of books piling up in people’s closets following the advent of the e-reader, giving new meaning to a medium headed toward ostensible obsolescence. Laramée carves intricately detailed landscapes and scenes from the dusty pages of old tomes that are as much a statement on the life-shaping power of a book as they are a work of art.

Upcycling Art Laramee Temple

Source: Guy Laramee

Upcycling Art Laramee Hills

Source: Guy Laramee

Highlighting how we acquire knowledge from books, his work includes everything from zen gardens to the ancient Temple of Petra. Some of the more intricate works can take well over a year to complete; a fair bit longer than simply reading the book.

Christopher Fennell

In what has to be one of the most ambitious projects of the upcycling movement, Christopher Fennell is constantly on the lookout for bygone methods of transport to transform into gigantic sculptures almost entirely unrelated to their previous purposes. From shelters constructed from real school buses to a wave made from canoes and a tornado of bicycles, Fennell breathes an incredible degree of life and potential into rusty parts and devices that we would otherwise consider unusable or irrelevant. And as we discard more and more objects in our tireless pursuit of “efficiency”, the prevalence of upcycling art will only increase.

author
Savannah Cox
author
Savannah Cox holds a Master's in International Affairs from The New School as well as a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and now serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of Sheffield. Her work as a writer has also appeared on DNAinfo.
editor
John Kuroski
editor
John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of interest include modern history and true crime.