Artist Grace Baldwin is scaling up the humble catchall into something you can step up to: a lifelike junk drawer built at monumental size, drawer and all. Framed by her longstanding interest in memory and function—”I typically create giant nostalgic but functional pieces, mostly through woodworking,” Baldwin tells Colossal—the new project pushes her practice into fresh territory. “I’ve been trying to branch out and utilize other materials more often and expand my creative ability. This project has given me the ability to do exactly that.”
What’s inside the drawer
Inspired by her own household stash, Baldwin is populating the oversized compartment with familiar, timeworn items rendered at a blown-up scale. A smudged Pink Pearl eraser, a Blockbuster Video membership card tucked into a plastic sleeve, and a half-used roll of Tums mingle amid a growing scatter of hyper-real objects. The first piece she made was a giant pair of corded earbuds, and from there she began adding a few new elements each day.
As she shared progress on social media, viewers chimed in with the random artifacts lurking in their own drawers, turning the piece into a loose, virtual collaboration. “A lot of the suggestions overlapped with my original list, which was a fun reminder that junk drawers are surprisingly universal,” she says.
Process, pace, and what comes next
Baldwin credits the project with shifting her outlook on making, material experimentation, and the power of detail. The realism of the build—right down to scuffs, smudges, and the wear of daily life—anchors the work’s relatability. The pace is open-ended: “At this point, I plan to keep adding things until it feels right,” she says.
She’s currently developing some larger objects so the remaining space can be layered with more small pieces, and she’s thinking ahead to its eventual life beyond the studio. “I really am hoping to find somewhere to display it once it is finished,” she says. “Maybe even leaving the possibility of the items remaining loose in it so that they can be rummaged through. I think there will be so many fun details to find hidden in the layers of ‘junk.'” In the meantime, Baldwin continues to document the work-in-progress on Instagram, inviting more suggestions and memories into the drawer’s expanding inventory.
Baldwin’s junk drawer doesn’t tidy anything away so much as preserve it—scaled up, painstakingly observed, and set where we can finally see the stories we usually keep out of sight.
