David Hamlow hasn't thrown anything away since 1999. 

"We have the compost, and that's the garbage. Everything else gets saved. It gets cleaned and saved," David told me over Zoom one June afternoon. 

David is an accomplished installation artist and has exhibited his work, mostly constructed out of items that would have ended up in his trash if he had one, everywhere from Joshua Tree, California to South Korea. 

But before that, he worked at a material aid charity in the Twin Cities. There, he sorted through thousands of donations a day and packed "bales of aid" bound for countries in Africa. 

"I got interested in how a small group of people could produce all this stuff. We would pile the clothes up and put them in bales, and put the bales in burlap sacks, and then we would build these huge pyramids of bales in the warehouse until we sent them out," he said. "I started thinking, what if you were like a little factory, just yourself, sitting in the studio making 75 of these things, or 100 of some other thing."

Around that time he started saving his own trash. Then he became his own assembly line.

David works modularly, meaning much of his work is constructed out of small identical pieces that fit together to make a larger whole. One project he's been working on for almost 20 years has resulted in the construction of 2,000 nine-inch-long "bricks" made out of cardboard waste. He installs the bricks at gallery spaces in various configurations. 

"When you come into the installation, you are kind of overwhelmed by what one person produces."

Each brick has a small plastic window where he places an item one would find in a "junk drawer," i.e. something small and unrecyclable. He also invites others to place items from their junk drawers inside the bricks. He calls it "brick adoption." 

All of David's art is constructed from the "results of [his] own consumption." His household trash is cleaned and stored in a storage unit and throughout the home he shares with his wife, the artist Liz Miller, in Good Thunder. 

[images of different works; include one where he displays things he's found on the ground in Good Thunder and around the world with caption explaining it- include funny toy anecdote]

David's work doesn't pretend to be anything other than the material it's made out of. He's not interested in transforming trash as much as he is in considering how much waste consumers are forced to produce. Packaging, especially plastic packaging, is of special interest to him because it "leads you back to the producer." Producers are the biggest wasters. 

"For me, it's a reminder that most of the things that they tell you about plastic recycling are actually not true," he explained. "It gets sent overseas and landfilled, just like it would have been here. We really disappear that problem rather than solve it."

But David's work isn't only fixated on his own consumption. For over 15 years, he has partnered with local elementary schools to create large-scale art projects. Without grant funding, he wouldn't be able to continue his work with kids. Recently, a grant from Prairie Lakes allowed him to work with the art department at Northside Elementary in St. James. 

"I tell them to be a detective about yourself as a consumer. Spend a week observing what you keep buying over and over again," he explained. "Once you see what you get a lot of then just start to accumulate it and think about how you can transform it."

The projects are mostly temporary installations. Creating them helps kids work together to think differently about their own trash, and experience how artists make patterns by organizing objects by shape, color, and purpose.

"It makes them think about how something doesn't have to just always go into the garbage. If it's clean and it's interesting, you might be able to come up with something else to do with it," he said. 

"I really enjoy the openness they have to thinking about material in a different way than we tend to as adults. Adults tend to think of [trash] as something that's a hassle, that's creating anxiety and needs to be disappeared. To them, it's just another material, and they're very excited to use it for anything."