By forging deeper, more lasting relationships with the things that we own, we can help create a balance in a culture of over consumption.
Discarding an item from your life does not make it disappear. Ellen Schlabach’s work in the non-profit space at Turnip Green Creative Reuse has given her a keener eye on the waste we create and how most discarded items can serve second (and third and fourth!) purposes if we learn to think more critically about our desires, consumption, and the objects we’re choosing to hold onto. But stuff is the stuff of life—we don’t need to feel guilty about having things, we just need to reframe how we view them. By thinking of our everyday items as our legacy, as a reflection of ourselves, we can make choices to buy things that actually matter to us. By the time our favorite items wear out, we’re hoping they hold a lifetime of memories and history.
About the speaker
Ellen is an artist and community engagement champion living in Nashville. With a background in fine art and education, she has spent 10 years in the nonprofit sector and four years at Turnip Green Creative Reuse. Her position at Turnip Green lies at the intersection of her passions: environmental stewardship, art, and community engagement/education. At work, she spends her days digging through the community’s discarded objects and determining their potential for reuse. She once oversaw the repurposing of 11,000 airline seats in 12 months, she’s taught countless sewing workshops with discarded remnants, and she is currently growing 12 kinds of peppers in a discarded road case.
Ellen’s position at Turnip Green has deepened the intentions behind her artistic practice. Forever multidisciplinary, she jumps from narrative painting, to quilting, to found object installations. Her current work is a visual anthropological narrative of what we as a species are doing here and what we leave behind to show for it; juxtaposing nature with consumption, simplicity with excess.
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