What to do with old Yellow Pages (or even new ones…)? This year’s Sculpture by the Sea at Tamarama beach revealed one solution – turn them into art. This is let your palm do the walking by Tom Blake, a fake palm tree created from Yellow Pages. The title is a play on the old Yellow Pages ad line to “let your fingers do the walking” instead of traipsing around shops, except it’s a palm but not the palm of your hand but… look, do I have to explain everything?
It’s a neat joke. The pages are recycled and, in a kind of reverse engineering, used to create a new type of tree – still dead but nevertheless emblematic of what went into creating the pages. Not palm trees, obviously, but trees nonetheless, ones which, according to the Yellow Pages publisher Sensis, come from “responsibly managed forestry sources”.
It’s important too that the tree is obviously fake – there’s something kitschy and slightly tacky about a fake palm, in keeping perhaps with its beachside location. It’s creating something fun out of an iconic print product which has seen better days, giving it new life, albeit shredded and rearranged. The Yellow Pages are rendered more useless – which is how many people regard them anyway – but, in a cute twist, made decidedly more intriguing and eye-catching.
