Guy GAL Tim Gaudreau
New Hampshire Sunday News (Manchester, NH) April 25, 2010
This eco-artist lives green
By JIM KOZUBEK
Special to the Sunday News
PORTSMOUTH
IT WAS LATE February, the winter light pale and snow remained in dirty patches. Tim Gaudreau emerged from a reconverted barn turned art studio on this old farmstead on Jones Avenue, carrying a pile of firewood, and smiling big. His biggest problem — he was running out of vegetables. ”By this time of year, it’s running out,” he announced. Gaudreau is a vegetarian, and he grows most of his own food in an extensive raised-bed garden in his backyard, which he stores to eat in the winter. Squash, onions, carrots, and a pumpkin was turned into a pumpkin bisque with roasted potatoes. Chickens squabble and shuffle in coops behind his studio, of which he uses to harvest eggs on a daily basis, but he doesn’t eat doesn’t eat them. “They’re pets,” he says. “They’re our friends.”
As a professional artist, Gaudreau is rare as one who is able to make all of his annual income each year from his art; as an environmental advocate, unique in his embodiment of ideals that he extols.
Cars in his driveway, a pair of diesel Volkswagens, one plastered with a “Free Tibet” sticker, run on biodiesel from local distributor Simply Green, LLC. He installed a solar hot water system and passive solar devices from Manchester-based Solar Components Corp., and he is installing a photovoltaic system.
National Public Radio chortles on the air in his studio.
Sleeves of harvested honeycomb from a backyard apiary lean on the floor.
Gaudreau keeps hives of bees on his property and talks about the perils and disappearance of bees and bats in the Northeast, and on all things ecology-related. He thinks his sympathies and awareness developed at a young age, probably due to his own biology. “I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog,” he said.
As holder of an MFA and a self-described “eco-artist,” whose photography and sculpture is designed to “raise eco-consciousness,” he has made a mark, capturing a $30,000 grant from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, and others from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts.
His gorilla tactics have included a decent on the City of Boston, with fellow rabble rousers, the Green Artists League, in which he wore a polar bear costume, asking passersby for spare ice.
Even as his work is overt and provocative, Gaudreau has not shied from turning criticism on himself. In one stunt, which resulted in an exhibited piece called “Self-Portrait As Revealed by Trash,” he photographed every single thing he threw out for an entire year, building it into a 5,000-picture collage.
“The details about it … it was a piece of advocacy, but it was very intimate,” Gaudreau said.
It is how Gaudreau met his wife, Atlanta McIlwraith, a social enterprise manager for Stratham-based Timberland Company, who saw the art project as an exceptional “singles advertisement.”
The couple married in 2007. Gaudreau built her an earthen couch in the backyard that sprouts grass. “Adults don’t sit on the grass much anymore, so this was a way to do that,” he said.
Atlanta's Living Couch
He subsequently began several commissioned projects for Timberland, which ranged in pay from a couple hundred dollars to more than $10,000, including a sign for an Earth Day ad, created entirely from Dumpster diving, which read “CHANGE THE CLIMATE.”
For the sign, he built each letter out of a different waste product: The T was made out of trashed electronics, another T from compact discs, an H from plastic bottles, a C from aluminum cans, an M from plastic shopping bags, a G from thrown-out toys, and so on.
“It was a great demonstration for kids,” Gaudreau said. “I asked how many of these toys do you think are broken, and it turns out, all of them were serviceable.”
Timberland also asked him to create a demonstration for a new recycled boot line, which he did, with a gigantic boot made out of plastic bottles and bootlaces woven from discarded shopping bags.
The ad for a campaign called “Give Plastic the Boot” began an international campaign for the company.
“The image appeared all over the world, so it was very exciting for me,” he said.
Gaudreau’s income is derived from a mix of private and public commissioned projects. He led a project at the Lincoln Street School in Exeter to build an outside classroom out of the logs from a 250-year-old tree that had fallen on the property.
“This tree was pretty important to the identity of the school, and its loss was palpable,” he said.
With volunteer support from 50 Timberland employees and the school, he helped create a circular classroom with wooden benches encasing sculptures of bears, turtles and birds cast from recycled aluminum cans, based on the concept of a Native American medicine wheel.
“I wanted to create something with strong roots to aboriginal history, something that ties back to all of history,” he said. “Each stone has a meaning.”
Copyright, 2010, Union Leader Corp
