Eyesore will get flowery renewal
Teens turn out in droves to help artist with project
What most people see as trash are crucial building blocks to Carol Simon — not only for an iridescent fence to cover a First Ward eyesore but to grow a community spirit around the arts. Recycling some of the 38 billion water bottles that go wasted here every year is a plus.
“I wanted to make something beautiful out of something ugly,” she said. “I see it as a community saving the environment and beautifying a neighborhood.”
Simon, a self-taught artist who looks more like the PTA mom that she was in a previous life, devised the idea after a recent visit to Prague. She already had been using recycled material in her work, making a mannequin out of Coke cans and a chandelier out of plastic. But it wasn’t until she saw the John Lennon wall in the Czech Republic that her most ambitious project yet was borne.
The wall, which became a venue of expression for critics of that country’s communist regime in the 1980s, is art in constant metamorphosis, inscribed with poems, covered with paintings, and switched up almost daily. Simon wanted to replicate such an idea in Houston, and she envisioned a bright fence made out of painted plastic water bottles cut into flowers, swirls and twirls.
“It will look like a garden and it will never die,” she said.
She approached the First Ward Civic Council, a nonprofit focused on improving a once dilapidated historic neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying. They had the perfect spot: An old, chain-link fence near railroad tracks on the site of an abandoned elementary school. near the corner of Houston Avenue and Edwards Street. Efforts to shroud the site near the corner of Houston Avenue and Edwards Street by planting trees had failed.
“We saw it as a way to bring life to something that’s lifeless,” said Elizabeth Holcomb, a volunteer with the nonprofit and an analyst at British Petroleum. “Everything beautiful is north of the railroad tracks and we said, ‘Let’s bring north and south together.’” Fence will be mobile
The project, which eventually will be a 150foot long fence that can be moved to other sites, was Simon’s biggest ever. Not only did she need help, but she wanted the community involved so it would feel vested.
Saturday, she had her biggest community effort to date when nearly 200 Mormon teenagers on a church retreat jumped in to help remove labels, cut and paint water bottles, and twist them into a mesh covering that will drape the fence. That the event came on Keep Houston Beautiful Day and was held at The Silos on Sawyer’s monthly second Saturday was an added poetic touch.
The project is as untraditional as Simon, who is 55, seems conventional. Born in Galveston, she went to Bellaire High School before graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with an advertising degree. She worked for a few years in marketing but stayed at home once she had children. Always one with a creative eye, she dabbled in photography and needlepoint. It wasn’t until her children left for college that she turned more seriously to art.
“When you’re an empty nester, you need to find yourself again,” she laughed.
In 2011, she began taking painting classes. She trained with award-winning artist Salli Babbitt, who taught her a technique of pouring alcohol ink and acrylic onto wood. Simon switched it up to plexiglass, creating large, striking pieces with magnificent and unusual blends of color.
“When you put the gold with these pinks, it does these really funky things,” Simon gestured at one of her works. “I like to express myself in happy ways that don’t fit into a box.”
Two years ago, her hobby had become serious enough that she rented a space near Washington Avenue at the Silos at Sawyer Yards. The transformed rice factory is one of the city’s newest studio projects.
“If you had told me a few years ago that this would have happened, I would have laughed,” she said. “But it fits with what I believe in, that you can do anything you want. Life is a journey, that is the story behind all of this.”
Saturday, she seemed every bit the mom-artist she is as she launched into an explanation for the teens, who were part of a yearly weekend service retreat organized by the Houston Texas North Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an organization of about a dozen congregations from The Heights to Spring.
“You’re not only saving water bottles and saving our earth,” Simon told the teens before they began. “You’re making flowers, you’re making grass … you’re doing a project that’s going to beautify a neighborhood that is very transitional.” ‘Not very artistic’
Some of the teens were perhaps more interested in spray-painting than the larger mission. For many of these suburban souls, beautifying an urban neighborhood was a largely foreign concept, yet one most embraced with fervor.
“You don’t get to do this all the time,” said Rylie McBride, a 16-year-old sophomore at Klein Collins High School in Spring. “I haven’t seen stuff like this before and what we’re doing is help beautify Houston.”
Some, like 18-year-old, home-schooled Jacob Cox, were more pragmatic.
“I’m not a very artistic person,” he admitted, cutting a luminous green bottle into twirls meant to resemble grass. “But this helps me be more artistic and, more importantly, it helps me bless other people’s lives.”