Tressa Prisbrey Analysis

Tressa Prisbrey, or known as Grandma Prisbrey is a female outsider artist who built The Bottle Village. She lived in Simi Valley, California where the Bottle Village is located. She began to build The Bottle Village when she was about sixty years old. Bottle Village is a village and also a landmark that was built from recycled items. All of its sculptures, buildings, walkways and monuments were built with findings from the neighborhood dump. Grandma Prisbey’s original idea was to create a structure to store her 17 thousand commemorative pencils that she had. However, she did not have the money to build it. Thus, she went to the dump and collects things from there and used them to build the Bottle Village.
When I first watched the clips that …show more content…
It is because, mainstream people may not have the idea to build houses just for his/her pencil collections—this is a part that seems harder for me to understand. However, my view about her changed after I heard her stories about her trauma and sufferings. She had really tough experiences in her life and it justified why she built all those things. I think the Bottle Village is so unique and creative. The materials that she used, the things that she stored, and the buildings and structures that she built mostly referred to her past experiences. Thus, I believe that she built the Bottle Village as a therapeutic creation to escape her rough life.
In Dr. Dobler’s lecture on “Outsider Art”, he defined material behavior as a study of folk art that highlights the role of the creator’s personal …show more content…
In my opinion, the random materials that she used to make the Bottle Village are the same as materials used by Simon Rodia to build the Watts Towers. He used random things such as tiles, broken glass and seashells to build the Watts Towers, same as Grandma Prisbrey that also used random things that she found from the dump. Her motivations to build the Bottle Village were also kind of the same as Simon, because she built things to make her remember her experiences with her children and also makes her remember her lost childhood. For example, most of the objects she created are from dolls, which can signify her lost childhood (Wojcik, 190). Simon built the tower as a way to remember his Italian heritage, as his building resembles the statue from the Giglio festival. The main difference between them is the art they produced—Grandma built bottled houses while Simon built