Cup Pojects

My fascination with paper coffee cups began when I found myself drawing on them during meetings. I soon realized how suitable the surfaces of these cups were for a variety of painting and drawing materials. In addition, the idea of recycling an inexhaustible supply appealed to me, as did the fact that I could work in a full-circle format, allowing me to create continuous compositions with essentially no beginning and no end. At that point, I began to save all of my coffee cups to use as "canvases" for making art.

The subject matter of these cups is often inspired by specific locations, particularly patterns of light, shadow and ever-changing weather. They can also be spontaneous, intricate iterations of designs, motifs and organic forms. Though each cup is a finished artwork in itself, I assemble them into arrangements, either suspended in strands, aligned on surfaces in series, or displayed in unity with a painting. Regardless of the presentation, I am able to continually rearrange the individual elements to reveal new relationships. Like kaleidoscopes, the compositional possibilities are limitless, in a sense, depicting multi-faceted realtities where nothing ever stays the same for long.

Gwyneth Leech

Gwyneth Leech

Exhibitions