The Collector: How an artist finds inspiration in overlooked materials

Sitting cross-legged in a chair, Tone Jackson is surrounded by collections — a cup full of pistachio shells, artwork taped to the wall, a dozen reclaimed canvases, a bag holding hair clippings from his last afro cut and customized shirts hanging from a silver rack in the back corner. He recalls a time when even an empty jar of tomato sauce was too valuable; waste was a luxury his family couldn’t afford.

“I’m a gleaner,” he says.

The artist remembers experimenting and creating since he was a child. Whether it came from composing silly songs with his siblings in GarageBand or building his own bed when his family moved to a new house, his energy for creating has remained. Now, the SESP fourth-year continues to pursue his creative endeavors as he applies to graduate school and approaches the deadline for his senior art show.  

The oldest child of 11, Jackson’s bustling house in Jacksonville, Florida became a teaching ground for the practices he replicates today: gathering thrown-out items to reuse and then remake into his own piece that he “likes looking at.”

He put a name to the habit when his mother, Kathleen Jackson, taught him the Biblical story of Ruth, a widow who gleaned leftover barley from the fields of Boaz, an honorable landowner in Bethlehem. After separating the grain from the husks, she brought it to her mother-in-law to provide for them both. Then, he watched Agnès Varda’s
The Gleaners and I, a documentary following people in rural and urban France who gather discarded items for personal use or to make into art or because it is “wrong for waste to happen,” Jackson says. Historically, gleaning meant gathering excess crops after a harvest, but as Varda shows, it persists in many modern forms.

“I’m obsessed with the idea of collecting and holding,” Jackson says. “I hate throwing things out. I’ll take any chance I can get to give new life to an object.”

His latest project, four blown-up images of boxlike forms printed onto large sheets of black paper, began with a growing collection of items he found visually interesting, like a dumpster or utility box. He says that after noticing a pattern, it gave him a direction — one that then led to a string of questions. How large could an image on his phone become? What would happen if he made the photo transparent instead of burning it into a screen?

For him, changing the medium and context transforms meaning. An image in your hands is one thing; scaled up and placed on a wall, it becomes something else entirely.

“In a lot of ways, my goal in creating is to create for its own sake,” he says. “But I also use my art to explore and learn.”

When he encounters a piece, he collects his thoughts and feelings, yet again reaching for a list of questions. What is captivating? What’s better left out? How can an artist communicate through the language of their work? Through this process, his creativity grows, and by observing what others make, he learns how to create.

Weinberg first-year Simon Mango, who works with Jackson in the art department, says the gleaner takes advantage of art’s “unique power,” which he believes is the ability to see inside someone else’s mind. 

“The work I do is very reactive and based on how I’m responding to the things I see and collect,” Jackson says, gesturing to the recycled canvases piled beside him. “It gives you a starting point.”

The artist follows this feeling through all his works. He moves between photography, painting, carpentry and video — collecting different genres as he explores his art. Everything he does is an interconnected process, he says.

“Some people are content with being just one thing — a potter, painter or sculptor,” Kathleen Jackson says. “But he’s always loved finding different expressions of his art.”

What started with an empty can of tomato sauce now shapes how he navigates his creative process. Everything he encounters could have potential waiting to be noticed and transformed. As his 19-year-old brother Jayden Jackson says, the gleaner is deliberate and focused on his work. When Jackson sets his mind to a vision, he sees it through.

Whether in his studio, his phone or his mind, the collection remains, ready to be transformed into a deliberate expression of movement and experimentation.

“Not everything that I do is art,” Jackson says. “But, everything that I do, I do as an artist.”