Arts & Entertainment

Trash to Treasure: 'Green' Artist Jill Eudaly Creates Works of Art from Everyday Items

Specializing in recycled materials, the Renfrew native has been published in two different crafting magazines.

Where someone else might see a pile of garbage, artist Jill McMaster Eudaly views it as potential art supplies.

Eudaly’s work, which is made with anything from old newspapers to Christmas cards and other recycled materials, has landed her in multiple crafting magazines.

“For some reason, it’s my God-given right to make stuff out of junk,” Eudaly said with a laugh.

A graduate of Slippery Rock University with a degree in environmental science, Eudaly always has had a soft spot for the greener side of things.

While some of her work isn’t explicitly making a statement, her art is almost always a creative combination of things she has lying around, she said. One of her favorite things to work with is the brown paper bags from in Zelienople.

“We have so much in our houses and people just think it’s garbage, but really there’s a use for everything,” said the Renfrew resident, who has used the cafe bags to make costumes, paintings and other mixed media art. 

Eudaly’s crafting work has been featured twice in Cloth Paper Scissors magazine and will show up in the pages of the Fall issue of Green Craft magazine. Even though she wasn’t focused on getting published when she mailed her ideas to the magazines, Eudaly said her work kept making it into the publications.

“It just keeps perpetuating on its own to my surprise,” she said.

Eudaly also runs Recycled Daze, an art blog where she shares her artwork and ideas with readers and friends. Online communication is important to Eudaly, whose most recent favorite hobby is mail art swaps, something she discovered on the web.

“The Internet is amazing,” Eudaly said.

For the swap, artists exchange handmade postcards and other items through regular snail mail with people from across the country and all over the world. There even have been mail art galleries on the other side of the nation that have included and displayed Eudaly’s mail art.

With painting, photographing and even helping to create sets and costumes for her daughter’s plays, Eudaly is never short of creative things to work on. Even with all that, Eudaly said she hopes to expand her blog, create more gallery work and get published again.

“I keep going forward,” she said.


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