CH O I CES R E TR E A D S
The Zip-up
Artist
Look closely—you might find
part of your last thrift-store
donation in this crafter’s work
BY DEBORAH SNOONIAN
68 | Feb/Mar/07 plentymag.com
WE CALL
‘‘
THESE WORKS
Art by Edna Tunison and
Mary Corman (Pitman Publishing Corporation, 1974).
“I thought, this is interesting
and I think I could do these
projects,” she says. She made
her first work in 1988, creating a landscape scene by gluing zippers
onto an old cabinet door her husband had
brought home from a tag sale.
She displayed the piece in a hobby show
at the hospital where she worked, and the
reaction was enthusiastic. “No one had
seen anything like this before,” says Petrell.
“They were really interested in it. So I said,
‘If you have any old zippers,
you know who wants them.’
And boy did I get zippers!”
Since then, she’s become
something of a zipper-wielding Grandma Moses, spending an average of two months
on each piece.
Now living in Hudson, Wisconsin,
Petrell still receives zippers through donations and by tearing them out of old clothing and other items (although she notes
that the former can be a challenge because
“clothes are made differently now—it’s not as
easy to take out the zippers.”) She trims them
‘EYE CANDY
FOR THE
FINGERS.’ ”
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY JANET PETRELL
many people take up hobbies when they
retire: card games, golf, knitting afghans
for the grandkids. Donna Petrell, a retired
nurse, took up zippers. Long zippers, short
zippers, metal zippers, plastic zippers,
zippers from discarded pairs of jeans or
tattered sleeping bags, zippers so ubiquitous we nearly forget they exist. For nearly
20 years Petrell has coaxed old zippers to
life, arranging them in spirals, curves, and
waves to make still lifes and portraits that
transform everyday images into colorfully
textured works of art.
Petrell, 79, who was born in Grand
Forks, South Dakota, has been an avid
crafter throughout her life. “She was raised
during the Depression, so she was always
taught to save and reuse things,” says her
daughter Janet. In 1986, while living in
Rochester, Minnesota, Petrell picked up a
used book (now out of print) called Zipper