“We live in a throwaway society and it doesn’t have to be that way.”
For a peaceable type who speaks with a quiet drawl and gazes with slow wonder at the world around him, you wouldn’t pick Paul Minchin for being a warrior.
But modern-way warrior he is, and the target of his ire is the mountain of waste that spills onto urban verges and into garbage tips and landfills to make way for the next cycle of conspicuous consumption.
“We live in a throwaway society and it doesn’t have to be that way,” says Paul.
“When I first saw the stuff that people left on their verges for rubbish collection by the Perth Council I saw potential where others saw nothing but waste. I found a whole lot of old dressed jarrah wood and took it home and built a coffee table.”
The salvaging of that wood pile duly turned into a crusade against waste that has now endured for many years, and, Paul hopes, made some converts along the way.
In the time he finds between house renovations and playing keen-eyed gatekeeper at the Walpole Recycling Station, Paul has now made “thousands” of art pieces from wood, wire and recycled items – many of which he sold from his stall in the old Fremantle markets before he moved down to Nornalup in 2001 where he now lives with his partner Tash Viner and Caelan (13) and Luella (8).
“My motivation is to take other people’s rubbish and bring it together with a little creative imagination to make it worthy of being exhibited in a palace. I have taken ‘rubbish’ and made it into things from couches to hall stands, to smaller trinkets, wall hangings, garden ponds… you name it.
“There is beauty in everything. You just have to know how to look at it,” he says.
A background in the hospitality and entertainment industry in Perth did not include singing in a chorus line. Had it, Paul might have been excused for singing a scavenger’s version of the show tune ‘My favourite things’, losing the chocolate-box images of raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens and replacing them with his own particular list of unlikely treasures.
“Wire has become my favourite thing,” he says. “I love to play with wire and my latest passion is making moving sculptures from wire. But they tend to grow as you make them and take years to build.”
Paul says he is an avid gardener as well as a seed-saver, and when he is not making art pieces from recycled rubbish or renovating his house, he and Tash and the kids can be found in the garden of their home in Nornalup.
