♪♪ Calder: Every summer, the entire city of Breckenridge is activated with art during the Breckenridge International Arts Festival... [Dog barking] and I was invited by Breck Create to be their artist-in-residence this summer.

♪♪ They asked me to make a piece for one of their trails.

Multiple trails throughout the city will have art pieces and art installations.

♪♪ A previous artist for the International Arts Festival made a troll, and I thought, "If there's a troll, then there must be other mythical beasts in Breckenridge," so, therefore, the unicorn.

This is gonna be my first animal public art project, and I'm trying to stick to what I believe my studio practice should be, that is, to make a public art sculpture completely out of garbage.

♪♪ Trash is a totally human, manmade cultural problem.

It doesn't exist in nature... ♪♪ but I can transform these materials into beautiful objects.

♪♪ Nature never wastes.

That's why I reuse.

That's my mission.

Woman: Got some plastic for me?

Man: How are you?

I do.

Woman: Awesome.

Dump it out.

Man: See what we got here.

Woman: Thank you.

Man: Can you take any of this?

Woman: Perfect.

Tamara: What really attracted us to Calder and her work was that it was an opportunity for our community to kind of bring something that's important to them, that being recycling and to think of creative ways to use their plastics for art.

Calder: So the City of Breckenridge told me they have a trash problem.

It's these sleds.

They shatter after use.

The big challenge, of course, making outdoor art is making it waterproof... [Saw whirring] but what I'm most concerned about is preparing it for people.

She is big enough to mount, so I'm trying to use the sleds that Breckenridge provided me to give my unicorn butterfly wings.

Every morning since I've been in Breckenridge, Pixel and I wake up, and we try to find a new trail to hit.

All the art residencies that I have had, she's gone with me.

Sometimes you need a little emotional support when you've got a deadline.

Ha ha ha!

Being a creative child in Texas, that was my identity.

I would make my little clay animals.

I'd have this little tackle box.

I'd take it with me everywhere.

We'd go to a restaurant, I'd ask the waiter, "What's your favorite animal?"

and then by the end of the dinner leave the little animal with the tip.

♪♪ I went to the Kansas City Art Institute, and the ceramics studio was great.

♪♪ I started making hybrid or mythological creatures in my work... ♪♪ but at some point, clay started to feel arbitrary.

"Why am I sticking to this one medium?"

It was then that I started picking up other materials.

First was birth control packets because estrogen was now in the water stream impacting amphibians, so I cut little frogs out of these birth control packets.

Maria: Calder was part of a interesting generation of students who was doing really conceptual work that was activist and said something about the world outside of the materials.

Calder: So the guts of my unicorn are made out of plastic that's been collected from the community, so her girth is a bunch of to-go boxes, and her nose is Coke bottles, and then the county newspaper had a whole day's worth of misprints and gave me 400 pounds of newspaper.

Maria: Wow.

Calder: I only used about 100.

♪♪ It's a messy, very lengthy process to get the papier-mââché body of my unicorn.

♪♪ Maria: By making art out of trash, she's drawing our attention to how unsustainable not just art practices oftentimes are, but our lives and our communities oftentimes are.

Calder: It was a coat of two layers of cement, then laid down my beads and then the grout.

One of my favorite parts, though, is that the hooves are made out of coffee cans.

♪♪ One of my favorite materials right now are marker caps.

It's basically just slicing in and then rounding off.

There's a little flower.

I love cupcake tops, love promotional cups, kids toys, Easter egg shells.

They make good flowers, too.

It's funny now how much my brain has changed since making things out of trash.

I'm always thinking, "How do I play with it to make it into a flower?"

♪♪ These are my animals.

This one's "Dog Violet," "Snake Plant," "Valerian Vixen."

The ears are marker caps, and then these are bottle caps.

This is an Easter egg shell.

These are golf tees, and then the fur is made out of the sleds from Breckenridge.

♪♪ Drea: Not only is she creating alternative uses for our waste, Calder Kamin has been engaging all members of our community, but specifically the youth in our community, to create art pieces that will be part of her installation for Breckenridge International Festival of the Arts.

Calder: What we're gonna do is, we're gonna take a strip, 0:06:59.400,1193:02:47.295 ♪♪ and we're gonna dip it in the glue, and then I'm gonna lay it on the mushroom and then smooth it down with my hands.

I'm a huge fan of mushrooms because they're nature's best recyclers, and I thought it'd be really lovely to have papier-mââché mushrooms along the trail.

OK, so stick it on.

Perfect.

The kids make mushrooms, and they leave them with me to complete.

I apply what's called cement board.

This is what the cement is adhering to.

I then apply two layers of cement.

Once that has cured, I can start applying my beads.

♪♪ My last residency was in New Orleans, and while I'm walking the French Quarter, I see Mardi Gras beads dangling from balconies that have probably been there for over a decade... ♪♪ but that's how I figured out that the Mardi Gras beads would be a good plastic for the outdoors.

♪♪ Oddly enough, when we were locating the site for the unicorn, I look up, and there's a tree covered in Mardi Gras beads, and I thought, "This is the spot."

Uh...ooh.

♪♪ ♪♪ I had no idea that Mardi Gras beads would be relevant to Breckenridge, nor that I'd find them in the forest.

I had no idea that her butterfly wings would be made out of the sleds... [Drill whirring] Oh.

Nugget!

so she's got a lot of materials and elements that are all a part of Breckenridge.

Man: It's right there.

0:08:59.200,1193:02:47.295 ♪♪ ♪♪ Little wiggle.

Oh, there she goes.

Different man: That feels good.

Calder: Wow.

Man: Hey, hey!

Calder: She's made it.

The Eagle has landed.

♪♪ She's a really big surprise in the forest.

People come off the trail just drawn to her.

♪♪ The title is "Once Upon a Time in the Future," and my hope is, in the future, we've eliminated waste culture, so she's the mascot for that.

♪♪