The most popular float at this year's Huntington Beach's Fourth of July Parade is likely to be the one made out of trash. It may not smell very good, either.Andre Faubert, a Huntington, CA resident and volunteer for the Surfrider Foundation, spent a month earlier this year gathering trash for one hour a day along the city's shoreline. By the time he finished, he had more than 580 pounds of refuse, including bottle caps, plastic bags and Styrofoam.
Now, with the help of a student and an alum from the Laguna College of Art & Design, Faubert is turning his discoveries into sculpture. The finished piece will look, from a distance, like a crashing wave, with a curving blue base and white foam at the end of the curl. It may take a closer look to realize that those colors come from pieces of trash sewn and stapled together.
It was dirty work, to say the least, and graduate student Hannah Cosner said the stench proved overwhelming at times. Still, she said, the artists intended to jolt onlookers with the piece, which Farmers & Merchants Bank sponsored for the parade. "It should be really gross," she told the Huntington Beach Independent. "But that's why we tried to make it beautiful. People will see it from a distance, and then they'll come up."
