There was so much color on the beach because of all the garbage and my artist, I was like, Wow, it's so bright and colorful. And immediately I was like, this is horrific. So it was like, my brain was at war with itself about loving all of the bright and shiny colorful objects and then also realizing, like, this is an absolutely terrible thing, but my brain always looks at garbage as what else can you be?
The phrase one person's trash is another's treasure may be true in some cases, but turning trash into art takes some real effort. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast today, we're speaking with an artist who not only turns trash into art, but has taken a heartbreaking blow to her community and used it as inspiration to create and share a message of environmentalism and social activism. My
name is Jessica McGee. I am an environmental artist. I work with reclaimed materials, and I use my work to navigate social issues as well as my own mental and physical health challenges. I currently have an exhibit at Heartland Community College that addresses the building and destruction of a community garden and helped me navigate my feelings surrounding all of that, being as I was one of the people that helped to build the garden. Had
you always incorporated social issues into your art when you began making art, or did it eventually just get there and turn to be a confluence of different things.
I think it just got there organically. I think I've always used my art as a way to navigate mental health challenges and maybe like personal trauma and physical health challenges. And then I think, you know, it evolved organically into really working with the environment and then social issues. I'm the co founder of a nonprofit that works with people who are unhoused, so it's natural for these areas of my life to merge.
So tell us a little bit about the exhibit itself at Heartland, an unblighted area. What's the type of work that's there, and does it tell an overarching story or a bunch of individual stories. What will people see? The
exhibit itself looks like a garden with the same image of a no trespassing sign repeated throughout the exhibit. It shows up in most of the pieces. It is the story of this community garden as somebody who works with people who are unhoused, and has seen the benefit that community gardens have on not only people who are unhoused, but communities in general. It was really important for me to tell this story through art, which is how I communicate. A lot my art studio is located across the street from an empty lot where the no trespassing sign is but I have a lot of history in this building, beyond being an art studio in 2009 my husband and I had a bar and restaurant in this building, and we, along with several of our neighbors, built a community garden in an empty lot across the street. And we built that because during a cleanup event, a four year old found a hypodermic needle, and so our response to that was, let's let's be better neighbors. Let's, like, take care of our community. So we built this garden, and it thrived for several years. In 2019 it got an award from the city of Peoria for being a great space. In 2020 it was bulldozed to the ground, one of the reasons being that it was because it had been abandoned for years, despite receiving an award just one year previously, and because I now have a new business in the same neighborhood, and have for a year, I have seen what the neighborhood was like before the garden, during the garden, and now, after the garden and destroying the garden was a bad move,
so tell us a little bit about creating the garden and what it was like, and what that space was like when it was thriving. Yeah,
so we didn't really know what we were doing, which I'm a big fan of not knowing what you're doing and learning as you go. We approached the owners of the property, and we asked them if we could put a garden there. They had some concerns, like, would it require more upkeep for them? And we promised that we would take care of everything. We put a little pathway in there with some raised garden beds. We started doing events where we would let people go ahead and pull food from the garden. But we would also make up, like, pre made grocery bags with, like, cheap and easy meals, just to kind of give people a pre packaged option for them to come in and explore the garden. Kind of hard to get people just to come to a garden initially, you have to offer a little bit more incentive. And so we offered packaged food in an effort. To incentivize people to come and then pick their own food. Eventually, a stage was put on the garden. There was live music on First Fridays. There was art events. Some sculpture went in there. I mean, it was a great space
when you first moved your business or started your business in that area across the street from the garden. What was that neighborhood like?
It's an interesting neighborhood, and I, my heart is in that neighborhood, and will always be in that neighborhood, but it's on West Main Street in Peoria. And West Main Street is a real weird place, because if you are going down West Main Street, one block over on one side is a lot of wealth, and one block over on the other side is a lot of economic insecurity. And so the middle of Main Street is kind of almost like a clash of life. I don't want to say like lifestyles or whatever, um, but it's differing live. You have people who have all of this money who might not really understand what it's like to live in poverty, and the people with the money are making a lot of the decisions, and so for us moving into that neighborhood, I wanted to know my neighbors and work with them, and I guess just be a good neighbor. And I just feel like I learned. I learned a lot. I think I went in there with some preconceived notions, and was very quickly corrected on how people live. I am not super wealthy, but I'm not super economically deprived either. I'm kind of in the middle. So I think I was able to learn a lot from from everyone
you mentioned that your studio is now either in the same space or very near to the same space that your business was. Can you talk a little bit about what happened with the business, and then how that fit into the timing of the garden ending up being bulldozed.
So our initial business, we ended up closing in, I want to say 2015 or 2016 and we closed it for a variety of reasons, but the biggest reason that we closed it is because I was a community activist, and if you are a community activist, put a target on your back, and I ended up mentally, really just struggling with that target, and kind of lost all of my my passion for pretty much everything. So we just needed to close it for health reasons, for my mental health, but we had formed a community association to tend to the garden. So that association still existed, even after we had closed our business, and I was still in the area shortly after that as an outreach worker for a harm reduction agency. So that was my continued role, even though my business was gone, and
when they decided to get rid of the garden. What did they say? Why did they say this was happening, or what happened?
So we were never given a clear answer. We were told that a new business was going on to that property. There was an expansion of a current business, that there were needles everywhere, which, because I was working with a harm reduction agency. I know that wasn't true, because it's literally part of our job to do searches for those we were again told that the garden had been abandoned for years, which, again, it had received an award a year previously. So the abandoning, being abandoned for years, was not true. I believe the stage that was built there was built with a grant from the city also, which had also happened recently. It was also said that it was, what was it an open air drug market? I mean, we heard so many reasons. We were never given one reason for it. But now, because I'm in that same neighborhood, and I know what the neighborhood is like, all of the like problems that they said were associated with that area, they didn't fix any of those by getting rid of the garden. I've
seen some pictures of the area in the no trespassing sign that's there, and it seems to me that nothing that was done to that property up until the time the photos were taken anyway would have improved the accessibility of an open air drug market. It seems like it's the same, only overgrown and underdeveloped. So this inspired you with your art. That's what's an interesting part of this is kind of a heartbreaking story about how you and the other community members tried to work on this area, and then it seemingly was taken out in a very short period of time, without a whole lot of explanation. But you took some of that energy and put it into your artwork. Now, you opened a studio in that same area. Did you begin thinking of a connection between that and the artwork you were doing immediately? How did that develop?
I have a little bit of a contentious relationship with our city council person, our district council person, and I was specifically asked if I could not make waves. I wasn't asked not to create a community garden, but I was certainly discouraged from doing a lot of community activism. And. I had a breast cancer diagnosis a few years ago, and so I'm really being very care, and I'm fine. Now it's important to say like, I am in remission. I'm fine, but for me, it's really important to take care of my mental health and keep my stress levels kind of low. So I'm not just going to go charging in and being like, I'm going to put a new community garden in there, no matter what you say, because I'm trying to protect my mental health. So being there and seeing this empty lot, and seeing all of the issues that bulldozing the community garden was supposedly going to fix has been heartbreaking for me, and so what I do best is just talk about my feelings through art. So I just started building a garden, but specifically around that no trespassing sign, because I look at it every day,
the work that you're doing in building this garden has some unusual materials, or maybe not unusual, actually pretty common, but materials that one doesn't necessarily think of as being traditional Art. Materials tell us about what you're taking as your materials you work with.
So I utilize mostly discarded materials. So the stems for all of the flowers are actually from the wiring in my art studio. And my art studio used to be the bar that my husband and I own. So previous owners had put a bunch of TVs everywhere, and we actually had to cut them out of the ceiling, and so we had all of this electrical wire. So I used that for the stems of the flowers. There are, like, trellis looking things that are made out of water bottle lids. Those are all tied together with the same electrical wire. All of the paper that I used for the flowers is reclaimed from like baby showers, holiday gifts, things like that.
The two most important things that I included, kind of last minute though, in the garden are the use of tiny liquor bottles, of which there are no shortage in our neighborhood, and my own prescription medical bottles, my own prescription bottles. And the reason that I wanted to include those is number one because, again, there are liquor bottles all over this neighborhood, and I think we have a lot of folks in this neighborhood who might self medicate because they don't have access to insurance, they don't have access to regular doctor's visits. And I know from my work with an unhoused population that self medication is is really common and understandable as somebody who suffers with pretty severe anxiety, I believe that I used to use alcohol to self medicate that, and I'm really lucky that as I got older, I had access to insurance and doctors who understood my condition, and I now take a twice daily pill that controls my anxiety. But I think highlighting the haves and the have nots, just in terms of like medical treatment, I really wanted to include how I'm able to handle my anxiety because I have this privilege of access to medical care versus liquor bottles. Some of
the other work that you do as well, you make, uh, jewelry and and other things, and you almost take a similar approach, maybe not more directly, because I don't know that the jewelry is necessarily tied into this over arching theme. Maybe it is of the community garden. But you use some unconventional materials for that as well, right?
Yeah, I do. I use that trash. I use trash and I use traditionally unrecyclable items. And we started making sure that we used that terminology, traditionally unrecyclable items, because so many items that people think are recyclable, recyclable or not. And the only way to really tell is to call your local recycler. It doesn't matter what the package says. It doesn't matter what you think can be recycled. You have to call your local recycler, and those rules are are ever changing, but I use trash specifically for a couple of reasons.
Number one, I did a sea turtle conservation trip and got to actually work with 1000s and 1000s of sea turtles on a completely trashed beach, and it was such an eye opening experience, so that I definitely wanted to work with garbage. But the other thing is, is because I have had some severe mental and physical health challenges, and have found a lot of healing energy just being outside and in nature, and so I really want to be part of a movement to preserve that for future generations. And so utilizing garbage items in my jewelry allows me to open that conversation with a lot of people. Do you
go out and collect all of this stuff that you mentioned, where you got a bunch of the materials for the exhibit. But as you're collecting these things, do you just go out and find them? I
find a lot of stuff. I am my I don't I would not have a business if I didn't do the cleanups. The cleanups are very central to my business. We also do conservation donations. Those are very central to the business. The majority of the stuff I find on cleanups i. Actually can't use it's it's pretty gross. I clean up in some kind of gnarly areas. The Peoria riverfront is not as pretty as we wish it would be, and so a lot of the garbage there I end up having to throw away, but anything that's super colorful that I find on a cleanup I will save and clean and sanitize. And then I do get donations from people of those traditionally non recyclable items, because if there's no place to recycle them, it's just going to the landfill anyway.
So as you are looking at these items, you look at it and you see garbage and trash and something that makes the landscapes where they have ended up, they certainly don't belong there less attractive, but do you see things and go, Oh, I immediately think how I can turn that into something that is colorful and has a different connotation to what it looks like on the bank of the river or the side of the road?
Yeah. So that was, that was the thing that struck me when I did the sea turtle conservation trip, because I was in Costa Rica, and there was so much color on the beach because of all the garbage and my artist, I was like, Wow, it's so bright and colorful. And immediately I was like, this is horrific. So it was like, my brain was at war with itself about loving all of the bright and shiny colorful objects and then also realizing, like, this is an absolutely terrible thing, but my brain always looks at garbage as what else can you be?
The good thing about it is you probably don't feel a tremendous amount of guilt or anything, or any mixed feelings about turning the garbage into art and using his materials, because there will probably never be a shortage of garbage, no matter how many things you make. Yeah,
that, that part sucks.
Getting into this though, you know, you started this business, you have this art studio, and you use it to do a little education as well as draw people to or can you talk a little bit about how you share the word about your artwork and how the message of the materials and how you make it is in part with that.
So I do a lot of in person education. We have a pretty big farmer's market that I'm at every Saturday, all throughout the summer and early fall. So we do a lot of in person recycling education. I do exhibits like this. I've got another one that I'm working on for next year for our local library. Social media is a huge thing for me. I'm very, very active on social media. I do a lot of education there. And then part of the thing that I think is really important is the way that I design the jewelry. Because I think with recycled jewelry, you can always tell what it was like. Traditionally, you've always been able to tell what it was. I kind of liken it to like macaroni noodles on a string like it seems to it's pretty primitive. And historically, it has been pretty primitive. And so I follow modern trends and modern jewelry design and high end jewelry designers, and really try to follow their lead, because if you can make trash look like not trash, and something that you're willing to wear to, like a party or at a fancy dinner, it opens up the conversation to people who might not have been in that conversation before.
And as you share some of your experiences on social media with making this stuff, do you talk about the entire picture of the other stuff you're doing as well the community? Activism and your efforts to do cleanups. Is that part of the whole, I guess, channel that you create in talking about your work
I do, yeah, so I talk about my feelings all the time on social media. I it's, yeah, my channels are kind of a mix. I'm definitely not that person that like batches their content and does like the skits or anything like that. I basically show up when I have a thought and I will talk about my feelings about something I think I just posted yesterday, and I was apologetic because I haven't posted in a while, but I'm doing a lot of work right now because of the Grants Pass Supreme Court decision, which basically is allowing cities to criminalize homelessness, and because we work with unhoused people, part of my my job is to advocate for them, and so it's just taken up a lot of my time. So I definitely showed up on social media yesterday, and I was like, I'm sorry I haven't been around, but this is why, and talked a little bit about this Supreme Court decision that's impacting people who are unhoused.
As you opened your studio in your old neighborhood, did you encounter people that made use of the garden or helped you with the garden, and what did they what kind of reactions did they have to the way that you took that energy and put it towards the pieces you're making new?
Most of the people in the neighborhood don't know about this Barton exhibit. I actually was pretty intentional about wanting it to be a little far away from home, because I'm trying not to pick a fight with my city council person, even though, even by mentioning that that on this podcast, I might be picking a fight. But I've talked to lots of people who utilize the. Garden, and they miss it. I mean, they definitely miss it. And I just did a tiny mural on some concrete blocks, like one door down from my studio, and people were very appreciative of that. You know, in a neighborhood that doesn't often see a lot of joy because I'm right next door to a liquor store and across the street from a gas station, I think these like little pockets of Hope matter, and I think that's what the garden was, and people feel it's lost. Well,
Jessica, thank you for sharing your story with us and talking about the story of this exhibit, which is on display at Heartland Community College from now until mid October.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited about all of this.
Jessica McGee is an artist and community activist who lives in Peoria. Her exhibit and unblighted area is on display at Heartland Community College's Joe McCauley gallery through october 11 of 2024 if you're interested in other interviews about art, community, impact sociology or other issues. Subscribe to random acts of knowledge on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you found this one. Thanks for listening.
