Derya Diril has spent a lot of time around the Raritan Rivershed. An Edisonian by birth and an alumna of Rutgers College, she began casting plaster as a part of her graduate thesis at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her work examines the choreography of heterogeneous elements in the formwork compounded in the plaster cast.

Derya is one of the artists that coLAB and the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership have sponsored to create work from pieces of trash that have been pulled out of the waterways of the Raritan and its tributaries. She is making her work with pieces of ceramics and glass that had found their way into Mile Run, a stream dividing Somerset and Middlesex Counties. This tributary earned its name for being one mile away from the Raritan River where the Kings Highway, now 27, crossed it. Its origin source is 40°28′14″N 74°28′48″W and it empties into the Raritan at 40°28′38″N 74°28′3″W.

Tobiah Horton’s works in artistic and landscape media seek out the latent voices of materials found in a place in order to engage new interventions with the residue of current and past process. In his works of landscape architecture, sculpture, painting and drawing the mysterious traces embedded in found materials and sites are recontextualized through interplay with current social, physical and biological systems.

His master’s thesis in Landscape Architecture, “Drawing Process from the Willow Patch,” approached site investigation through the drawn and sculptural manipulation of site-found materials. This manipulation of materials was a performance of social and biophysical site processes such as infiltration, sedimentation, clearing, demolition, weaving, stacking and embedding.

His artwork has been exhibited in Hartford, Oberlin, Syracuse, Portland, OR and Montreux, Switzerland. Built works in the landscape medium can be visited at the Willow Patch in Cazenovia, NY, Queens Plaza, Long Island City, NY, at the Bethlehem Steel in PA, the Optical Gardens on North Charles Street in Baltimore, Womrath Park in Philadelphia, and at Rain Garden sites in Rahway, Ringoes, Newark and Springfield, NJ.

Tammy Knorr is a fiber and textile artist from East Brunswick, NJ.  Her fascination with the properties of every day materials and love of handwork has lead to explorations in knitted sculpture, embroidery on paper, woven paper images, quilted coffee filters, and most recently “creek trash” sculpture.  She enjoys the synergy and serendipity of collaborating with other artists, often transforming their discarded trials into re-imagined textile works.

Concerning her current commission for the coLAB Arts Watershed Sculpture Project:

“I jumped at the opportunity to revisit sculpture and flesh out some of the things I have wanted to try since making my first and only sculptural piece in 2013.  The beauty of this collaboration for me is that it fits my typical process: find (hoard?) interesting stuff and then figure out what to do with it!”

Tammy's other vocations include being a mom, framing at the B. Beamesderfer Gallery, and curating the community gallery space at OQ Coffee Shop & Roastery, both in Highland Park, NJ.

Christopher Carter Sanderson’s storied visual art career began in 1984 with the complete paint treatment of an abandoned shack on NJT’s spur line in Princeton, NJ. A gallery show at First on First in Manhattan in ‘90 cemented his reputation. His objects are in corporate and private collections. MFA, Yale. 

Christopher is one of the artists that coLAB and the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership have sponsored to create work from pieces of trash that have been pulled out of the waterways of the Raritan and its tributaries. His piece includes items that were picked out of the Mile Run tributary at two different locations. The bowling balls and rain coat were found at Mile Run, the border of New Brunswick and Franklin, while the shopping cart was found in a tiny stream off between Baker Park and Elmwood Cemetery.