Beautiful Garbage

"I'

ve just come back from Cambodia with a bunch of dried toads," declares artist Jerry Swaffield, pretty much by way of introduction. Thirty minutes later, he's prowling a patch of Bangkok wasteland, cars howling past on the expressway above, a stylishly ruffled figure picking through rubbish, which—in the opinion of gawking slum dwellers nearby—has already been stripped clean of anything valuable. "Very rich pickings," muses Swaffield, before plunking himself down in a discarded armchair that is hemorrhaging orange and yellow foam. "Awesome," he pronounces.

To understand this passion for garbage—and dried toads—one must visit an eighth-floor apartment in Bangkok's Chinatown, where a process of transformation occurs that has made this 38-year-old Irishman one of Asia's most unusual and gifted artists. Here, in his bachelor-pad-cum-studio, Swaffield recycles carefully scavenged refuse from across the continent into rare works of art—pieces like Bali, an achingly exquisite collage finished in gold leaf, or Chinatown, an exuberant homage to Swaffield's favorite Hong Kong graffiti artist. Hanging in his tiny bathroom is Conjunctivitis, a maniacal disco ball formed from discarded spectacles, each pair of which Swaffield first tried on to check the refractive qualities. ("I got conjunctivitis making it," he says.) Another work, called Solewave—a collage of 350 ocean-bleached flip-flops plucked from various Sri Lankan beaches—recalls the swirling intensity of a Van Gogh sky.

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Born on a British army base in Germany—his father was in the Royal Irish Fusiliers—Swaffield has led a life of wanted-by-Interpol restlessness in which Hong Kong, the Philippines and (his next destination) Cambodia are all places he calls home. He started out—at age 15—drawing for famous British comics The Dandy and The Beano. Even now, after stints as both a Ralph Lauren designer and a Hong Kong-based corporate artist, he has not forgotten his first love: witness the deliciously twisted (and unpublished) comic strip called Cheap Charlie: the Mental Moon, featuring a hapless backpacker adrift in psycho-tropical Thailand.

So what is Swaffield—cartoonist, designer, fine artist, what? Answer: all of these, and more. "People always want to pigeonhole you," he says. "Every day I wake up and wonder, 'What am I going to be today?'"

Back in Bangkok, we crack open some beers, and the afternoon takes another turn for the weird. "I've got 600 ballpoint pens in a box under that desk," Swaffield says abruptly. "I still don't know what to do with them." Or with those wafer-thin frogs, peeled lovingly from roads around Siem Reap and now drying in his window box. He cranks up his Mac to display his latest work: bizarrely beautiful etchings of Angkorian temples where rioting fig-tree roots pulsate and twist in freakish homage to the stone gods. "Surreal, obviously," says Swaffield. Obviously. "I've started messing about with robotics, too," he continues, producing a clockwork cat's skull that skitters across his desk on scary plastic-doll legs. "And have you seen my Babies in Bottles series?"

I have now, Jerry, and that reminds me: Have you seen my sock? I left a pair at the door with my shoes, but could only find one when I left. I suspect the other has already been sucked into Swaffield's vortex, a pungent complement to those toads, another piece of everyday destined (I'd like to imagine) for transformation into something singular and extraordinary.