Collage artist Danny O first heard the balls beckon back in the mid '90s, and he figured out that they were begging to be art. Today, a thousand or so of his scavenged spheres are nestled together in Balls to the Walls, a 35-square-foot sculptural collage that hung for more than a year in the DeCordova Museum before being rebuilt and mounted last month on a tunnel wall off Wormwood Street, on the edge of the Big Dig."The ball thing began as a walking meditation," says Danny O, who creates works from scavenged materials of all kinds. "I'd walk along the Charles River and the beaches of New England, repeating the mantra mamama -- which is an inward prayer asking the Holy Mother, a Hindu saint, to heal the earth. And as I was doing this, I started to find all kinds of recyclable things, most of it #2 plastic." He cleaned up a lot of beaches on his walks and amassed a mountain of bags full of plastic. For the purpose of art, however, the plastic proved problematic.
"At a certain point, I realized that the ball was the perfect found object," he says. "The balls all started out as perfect spheres, so they had a much stronger iconic connection to the mantra. When I found them, they'd often be crushed, dismembered, or very old and weathered, so that when I collected them it was like reuniting a family in a way. So now the balls are together like a huge ball-family reunion, chirping with stories of how they were lost, then found."
What kind of balls are in the O clan? "Every kind imaginable, from tiny ones the size of a pea to basketballs. I use golf balls, soccer balls, ping-pong balls, billiard balls, you name it." Although each ball is unique, the artist explains, the same image appears in all the ball collages: "They always take the form of a small boy who's looking through his hands like he's looking through binoculars. Always. It's an image that I've used for many years, a young innocent searching for vision. To me, it symbolizes the quest for truth, not only in art but in all of life."