I like making things. I like using materials at hand— like wire, plumbing, old house paint, and old nails. I also have a love for history and the mundane artifacts of our daily culture. The combination of these two “forces” Inspired the creation of “Artifacs”.

* * * “Artifacs” are a fun conceptual play in copper on the hard refuse of a hundred-fifty years worth of “shovel dumps”, which quite literally surround my two-hundred year old farmhouse in Madison, Georgia. Our ancestors didn’t enjoy curbside garbage pick-up as we do today. Instead, what they couldn’t reuse—they buried. And not in large pits, but in small shovel holes—usually behind a barn or shed of some sort. During the process of landscaping around the farmhouse, my wife and I found that no matter where we dug a hole to set a plant, we invariably dug into buried bits of metal, broken glass, and broken pottery. The metal objects were particularly interesting, ranging from broken plow points and harness parts to horse-shoes, mule-shoes, chains, nails (lots of old nails), and more—all of it telling of the farm’s history in fragment and rust.

* * * So it was from the patina of use and the elements, and the broken, sometimes indiscernible utility that inspired the vocabulary of the “Artifacs”. The “Artifacs” are not meant to represent anything in particular, but use the ambiguity of their form and materials to suggest that perhaps at some time in the past they were part of something valued and useful. Tim Reilly ‘09