PARKSVILLE – Margie Preninger used to consider laundry a chore. Like many of us, it felt mundane and mindless. “I’d never looked at it that closely,” she recalls with a smile.
About eight years ago, Margie started paying attention to what she found in her dryer lint tray.
"I just knew I had to start saving it,” she remembers with a laugh.
Whenever the dryer buzzed it was done, Margie would respond by gently rolling the lint off the tray and delicately placing it in a bag.
There was something about the lint’s diverse colours, shapes and textures. “My mind just started daydreaming about it.”
Margie began experimenting with the material: layering the lint, cutting the lint, and considering the possibilities of lint. “I didn’t expect it to be so much fun,” she laughs. “It sparks joy!”
Margie started making dryer-lint art. “I’m just sort of letting it speak to me," she says.
The professional artist and designer started using the material to create figurative and abstract images, exploring big ideas from the love to the environment. “I want to inspire people to repurpose, reuse, and try to create a zero waste lifestyle.”
Margie also enclosed some of her dryer-lint art in plastic rectangles and noticed how the different layers seemed to come alive, migrating into each other over time. “That was shocking to me,” she says. “The result was amazing.”
It was so amazing, Margie decided to share them as dryer-lint-art trading cards. “People say they’ll never look at their dryer tray the same way again!”
Which is what the great artists invite their audience to do, see our world from a different perspective.
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