Takin’ it from the streets

Mary Wheeler has a small carbon footprint; no computer, no television, no cell phone, no car, and no lawn.

She lives in a one-room apartment in downtown Spokane. She walks everywhere and she makes art. The two go hand in hand because her art is a reflection of the streets on which her feet have traveled.

“Much of my work is based on walking in urban areas, on sidewalks and the leaves and debris that form compositions,” she said, “Walking for me is like meditation. I love to be moving and, as I watch where I’m going, I notice the patterns, colors, cracks, lines, and textures.”

Wheeler was born in Detroit and raised in a creative environment: Her mother was a painter and her father, a writer, was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1980. It was then that Wheeler decided to fulfill her dream of being an artist. “I was 30 years old and did not want to be on my deathbed wishing I’d done what I always wanted to do. Life is short.”

She enrolled at the University of New Orleans (where her father was living) as a fine arts student and started to learn. “I think focusing on art at this time helped to transcend the chaos in my family life, to have some control, and create some order,” she said, “The intense focus required to create allows a person to temporarily detach from the outside world and block out the noise.”

She focused on sculpting with metal, welding and casting while learning other mediums. She graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree and followed up with graduate work, leaving the university a year or so before earning her master’s degree. “I ran out of money,” she said, adding that the faculty’s Deep South mentality was a little off-putting.

In New Orleans, she worked on Mardi Gras floats, molding papier mâché into large colorful sculptures. Walking through a pile of leaves sparked her fascination with the ground on which she and others trek. “The streets of New Orleans have a lot of character.”

Using recycled canvases, she treats them with many layers of acrylic paint to recreate different types of streets and roads. She then applies representations of leaves and debris made of cardboard, papier mâché, wire, gesso and modeling paste to create a three-dimensional painting. Sometimes she adds other abstract shapes that could pass for leaves but a tilt of the head can turn them into an array of interpretations including animals, crustaceans or other sea life.

She showed her creations at half a dozen venues in New Orleans but moved to where a friend lived in Seattle after 9-11 because she said the economy got bad. She moved to Spokane three years ago. Though her place is small, she has all that she needs: streets to walk, art supplies, and music. “Listening to good music and working on my art is the most stimulating thing I can think of doing.”

She hopes to find more space in which to create larger pieces but, for now, she is content to walk and share her findings with others, depicted as debris.