Newspapers occupy a strange place in our material culture. Even in their diminished state, millions of them land on doorsteps and on newsstands every day, a blizzard of paper and ink. By dark, they’re out of date, standing by to help light the woodstove.

But they also live on as a record of events, however fragmentary. They find their way into art, often as part of collages or assemblages. Newsprint, slightly faded, tells viewers they’re looking at a particular time and place that was worth recording.

Artist Elizabeth D’Amico has taken a different, less savory aspect of the materiality of newspapers and turned it into a statement about environmental degradation. The Springfield, N.H., artist started incorporating the plastic bags the Valley News is wrapped in into her work. I learned about it when she asked a colleague if the paper recycles the bags (it does, after a fashion, about which more below).

While the plastic bags are new to her practice, the environment is not.

“It’s been a part of my art for 35 or 40 years,” she said in a phone interview.

Ordinarily, I’d have shuffled over to the Newport Library Arts Center, where D’Amico’s work is on display as part of the center’s “Selections” exhibition, but Tuesday’s snow put me off. I opted to talk to D’Amico instead.

D’Amico studied to be an English teacher, graduating from Syracuse University in 1969 with a degree in English and education. But she’s both an artist and a musician and ended up teaching English, art and music in public schools for many years. From 1995 to 2002, she taught art at Coe-Brown Northwood Academy, which despite its fancy name serves as a public school for students from the New Hampshire towns of Northwood and Strafford, just east of Concord.

“Because of the teaching, I’m into everything,” she said of her artmaking. She makes prints and paints but also has worked with ceramics and sculpture, collage and assemblage. She participated in a global art project to make a collage every day for the month of February.

In retirement, D’Amico taught at Plymouth State for 10 years, including a course she designed, “Creativity and the Visual World.”

“We just sampled a little bit of everything,” she said.

She started incorporating plastic into her work to keep it from being tossed out. “Part of the reason I often choose to use found materials is because I feel strongly about being environmentally responsible as an artist,” D’Amico wrote in a statement for the “Selections” show. The other works she made for the show incorporate yupo paper, which is made of plastic, and acrylic paints she’s trying to use up.

D’Amico started working with the plastic newspaper bags by trying to incorporate them into a painting. That didn’t work out, so she changed modes. She started braiding the orange bags together. The color and the braids brought the children’s book character Pippi Longstocking to mind, and D’Amico shaped the bags and other materials into Pippi’s Beach Day, which highlights how bags and other plastic trash often end up in the ocean.

Reuse and recycling of plastic bags is a spotty business. The Valley News uses 2,500 to 3,000 bags a day to keep newspapers from ending up a sodden mess on someone’s driveway, the paper’s general manager, Rich Wallace, told me. While the paper accepts them back, Wallace said he suspects most end up in landfills. Bags brought back in good shape (meaning not torn) are set out for route drivers to reuse.

“We’d like to do something,” Wallace said, but as with all plastic recycling, finding a place to send it is a challenge. I collected plastic bags to send to school with my kid for a couple of years. The school, in turn, sends the bags to Trex, a company that makes plastic decking, and gets an outdoor bench in return. I haven’t heard any other bright ideas.

D’Amico plans to keep chipping away, using found materials to keep them from ending up in the trash. She runs Protectworth Studio and Gallery from her home in Springfield, which was settled as Protectworth in 1769, then renamed when it was incorporated in 1794.

“My next project will probably be something about the environment again,” she said.

By making art out of plastic bags, D’Amico is highlighting the long life of the material. Art, unlike news, is meant to be durable.

The “Selections” exhibition, featuring recent work by Elizabeth D’Amico, Jessica Fligg, Michele Johnsen, Sher Kamman, Susan Lirakis, Chris Scott and Yvonne Shukovsky, remains on view at the Newport Library Arts Center through March 15.

Hollywood’s blacklist

White River Junction’s Main Street Museum hosts a production of Trumbo: Red, White, and Blacklisted at 7:30 Saturday evening and 3 on Sunday afternoon.

The two-man show tells the story of Dalton Trumbo, the celebrated screenwriter who was a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s. Trumbo’s son Christopher wrote the play, basing it on his father’s letters.

The production brings a familiar face back to the Main Street Museum: Nick Charyk, frontman for Western Terrestrials, the intergalactic country-western band, performs alongside Donny Osman. For tickets ($20), go to sevendaystickets.com.

Facts are simple and ...

The Lifespan of a Fact, which dramatizes an exchange between the essayist John D’Agata and a magazine fact-checker named Jim Fingal, opens Thursday night at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield. Tickets ($20 for students, $33 for Thursday shows and $40 for Friday through Sunday shows) are available at shakerbridgetheatre.org or by calling 603-448-3750.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.

]]>