The Green Wheel Covers of Fortune

What do you do with used hubcaps (aka Wheel Covers)? Some of us might hang them on walls or use them to serve food, but English artist Ptolemy Elrington has created sculptures with them for six years. Originally, he set out to fashion a suit of armor, but got sidetracked making marine and creatures. As you can imagine, these pieces are large: Sizes are mostly 1'-6', but may range from 6" for a shark and 25 feet for a dragon. This is probably one of the coolest recycling art styles I’ve seen in a long time.

These creatures are made entirely from re-cycled materials. As he says in his website: "All the hubcaps are found, usually on the side of the road, and therefore bear the scars of their previous lives in the form of scratches and abrasions. I believe these marks add texture and history to the creatures they decorate, and so choose not to fill, overprint or alter them in any way".

Hubcaps come from various places: Ptolemy picks them up along the side of the road; friends and family have begun to save some for him, and now strangers, who have seen him in a magazine or TV, bring them to him. As he feels strongly about "our culture's lack of appreciation of the nature of value," he finds the hubcap gifts "very encouraging."
He recently completed a giant tuna, commissioned by a keen US fisherman; other commissions have included gargoyles, dragons, a giant turtle for a Kingston-on-Thames pub and a beautifully-formed husky dog, delicately sniffing the air.

When Elrington went to live in India for a year, he was impressed by the inventive reuse of materials as a matter of course. "In India I saw a great deal of poverty, people scratching a living out of anything. You see people rummaging around on a big pile of rubbish, getting little tiny pieces of wire out, melting the plastic and then selling the wire. That got me thinking, and I've always had an interest in the contents of skips."

Click here to read an interview with the artist.