They say it’s what’s on the inside that counts, but maybe not when it comes to mini-mounds of Babybel Cheese.
You pull on a center strip seal to open the package.
You eat the yummy cheese inside, perhaps with a cracker and some grapes.
You throw the red wax wrapper away? No way, Jose!
Not if you are 10-year-old Hazel Olson Dorf, a budding San Francisco eco artist who molds the wax into characters to create her highly-original miniature sculptures.
“I was playing with it one day and made a ball with a face in it and thought it was very cool,” shares the 4th grader about the process. “The next time I got some cheese wax, I made another guy.”
Featured in an exhibit in the lobby of Brandeis Hillel Day School in San Francisco, Hazel’s cheese wax characters are born of great imagination and embellished with found discarded objects the student finds at the homes of her friends.
Among the props that bring the balls to life are tiny shopping carts, gold paper coins, candy wrappers, broken pencils and safety pins. She spares these items from the trash, reclaiming them as treasures for the humorous and whimsical beings.
“They’re mostly weird dudes, not exactly human,” says Hazel, who has named a couple of them Alfonse and Spike.
“Hazel’s art is part of an innovative art movement in which artists choose to recycle and reclaim materials rather than use traditional art supplies,” observes Angela Willetts, a painter and art instructor at Brandeis Hillel. “Not only does her work look good but it also helps to save the planet.”
Willetts fosters an appreciation of green design at the school, overseeing projects all year that incorporate everyday household items from old socks for creating Ugly Dolls to used plastic wrap for peopling life-size sculptures in motion.
While the wax would seem a hard medium to transmogrify, Hazel has the process down.
“I actually hold it in my hands to warm it up for a while until it softens,” she explains, “and then I begin molding the balls.”
The only challenge for her is keeping up her supply of Babybel wrappers. “I eat the cheese, sometimes, but usually I rely on my friends to bring it in their lunches,” she says.
Like most artists, Hazel connects with other visionaries who see the world in a similar way. Her best friend, Lauren Kate Bradley, explores works on paper – that is, paper towels and cocktail napkins that have been gently used at her house.