A few weeks ago, Ozarks at Large heard about Cox Communications’ collaboration with local artist Eugene Sargeant and Springdale students to transform e-waste into a public sculpture. Reporter Jack Travis returned to the Cox store on Joyce Boulevard in Fayetteville on Tuesday, viewed the work in progress, and brings this report.
Wires, phones, remotes, and motherboards: it takes the mind of an artist like Eugene Sargeant to turn these discarded objects into a work of art.
“I’m going to call this sculpture the Tree of Communication because, I mean, communication is a beautiful word and very important,” Sargeant said. “And so, Tree of Life, Tree of Communication — it’s like communication is life in the modern reality, because we almost need information as much as we need food, in a way.”
The piece is ongoing, but one can see how it’s taking form. Sargeant has constructed tree trunks from rebar and made bark from recovered cables. In some places, he wove Ethernet cables together, creating a blanket cover. In others, the artist bound coax cables — like the ones from telephone poles — with phone handsets and TV remotes.
“Artists think like this when we’re working on our projects,” he said. “You know, like the theme develops, and like, one thing I find is that I don’t really know what I’m going to do sometimes until I actually get down here and see how the materials respond. And like this coax cable, for example, couldn’t have really predicted how much I was going to like it. And it flows, and it really, it just expresses, you know, like the flow of information, but also like the growth of a tree, you know. So the communications industry, it grew like a tree. You know, it developed one branch after another. And, you know, some branches died, and some branches really took off.”
Sargeant gathered these materials from Cox dumpsters and donations from the local community.
“Everything in this is recycled,” he said. “There’s nothing, no new materials, except for some nuts and screws.”
Until Oct. 24, Cox stores across Northwest Arkansas, the River Valley, and Harrison are accepting e-waste donations.
“So we’ve had a lot of people ask, what are some of the things that I can bring in?”
That's Tina Gabbard, market vice president for Cox’s Greater Arkansas Market. She says they’ll take any electronics that you don’t need anymore — TV remotes, phones, cables, old computers — really anything that once had a spark. While the collaboration with Sargeant is new, e-waste recycling for Cox is not.
“This is what we do in the community already,” she said. “So we’ve been part of a recycling and conservation effort before this effort started. But the fact that Eugene is able to mold this into a piece of art — you know, that old saying of somebody else’s trash is someone else’s treasure — is truly coming to life. And it’s really fun to see. We expect the kids to be excited about it. We expect a lot of people to be excited about it. And I think this is just the beginning of the things we’ll be able to make with him, with the items that our customers and community are bringing into our stores.”
All you need to do is bring your junk to a store. Gabbard says that when people drop off their e-waste, they should be sure to scan a QR code. This allows you to nominate a local school district for a lucrative opportunity.
“We want you to scan the QR code that we have in the store to register your school district for a $5,000 Cox Charities education grant,” she said. “So that’s very important too. You’re going to get rid of those items anyway. You may as well get your school district registered to win something for it.
“There are specific formats for the grant and what it can be used for, you know, but it’s pretty broad and pretty general. We have yet to bump into something that $5,000 won’t fund for schools. They can spend it pretty quickly on lots of great projects for literacy and reading and that kind of thing, and language and arts and all types of things. So yeah, there are some specific guidelines, but they’re pretty broad as well. They cover a lot of things. So yeah, we can’t wait to give all this money away and these grants away.”
The Tree of Communication continues to take shape. Sargeant says conversations with local students are informing the process. Back in September, students visited this Cox store and brainstormed together. The artist is keeping them involved.
“I have already visited three different classrooms, and I’ve left materials at them, and I’m gonna go back and pick those things up and see what they’ve done,” he said. “They’re working on stuff right now. Yeah. And so I will definitely be putting in things that they have made. The kids had so many ideas of, like, little miniature scenes and miniature worlds. And we got this idea of how nature does sort of make a space for our miniature worlds, and so we’re going to try to express that on the interior of this thing, so you can look in and just see all the intricate details. But yes, I think as the piece evolves, it’s becoming a testament to communications and just like how far we’ve come.”
Students will get to view the finished product, too. Sargeant says he’s purposefully designing the sculpture to be transportable.
“So it’s gonna move around, and it’s gonna be, hopefully, shared among the schools where the kids help make it,” he said. “And it’ll probably be here for a while at this Cox store. So yeah, it’s going to move around. So I’m going to make it — you can see I’ve made these lugs here — so it’s going to actually come apart, so that it’s not terribly difficult to move around. And I’m going to try to make it relatively durable. It’ll definitely be able to be out in the rain. But making public art durable is a real challenge. And of course, this has got a lot of little parts on it, so it’ll be interesting to see how it does.”
Travis: What makes it so challenging?
“It’s just that, you know, fastening things together durably is just really a challenge,” Sargeant said. “And there’s just, there’s a lot of different ways. So obviously, yeah, you can see I’m wiring these things on, and that’s pretty good, but sometimes getting a good bind on a thing — even that is challenging. These weavings are actually kind of surprisingly durable, and they’re actually a great solution for this. And probably the worst that will happen to them is that the colors may fade a little, but they’re in it for the long haul. I don’t know about these circuit boards. We’ll see how well they weather, but in any case, it’ll be able to handle whatever we throw at it.”
The final home for The Tree of Communication is still undecided. However, Gabbard says this collaboration won’t be the last of its kind.
“I’m not sure where it’s gonna land,” she said. “Because what’s happening is now a lot of people are saying, well, can you bring it here? Can you bring it there? And I think we definitely want to get it up into Springdale, you know, where we started with the Innovation Center and the kids from Harp and several others. I just want to do more of it. I just don’t want this to be one and done.”
Cox stores across Northwest Arkansas, the River Valley, and Harrison are accepting e-waste donations through October 24. When donating, you can scan a QR code in-store to register your local school district for a chance at a $5,000 Cox Charities education grant.
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