Jessica Ferguson has browsed the aisles of local improvement stores countless times during her life.
In fact, the 48-year-old cost analyst from Lawrenceville would just as soon spend the day pricing dryer ducts and gutter guards than shop for a dress and stockings. And it was during one of those trips last year, Ferguson said, that her right brain decided to, well, reveal its creative self.
In her hands, a dryer duct became a fabulous lamp, PVC pipe morphed into a stylish entertainment center and gutter guards mixed with tissue paper turned into aa gorgeous frilly chandelier, all of them constructed for just pennies.
“I crunch numbers for a living and never thought about my creative side,” said Ferguson. “I didn’t even know I had a creative side.”
As it happened, Ferguson was redecorating her home. She’d already painted the walls in grey and beige hues and was scouting for art. But she didn’t want what everyone else had and she couldn’t afford the $800 pieces she wanted most.
“I was walking down the aisle at Lowe's when I saw shiny pieces of dryer duct,” Ferguson recalled the other day. “I said, ‘Hmmm.'”
For $5.64 each, she purchased two pieces and headed home.
“I stretched it out and started smashing it with a hammer,” she said. “Then I started hanging it because if you hang it on the wall, it’s art, right?”
As she bent the pieces to give them form, Ferguson began to like what she saw.
“I went back and bought more pieces,” she said.
Even before the revelation at Lowe's, Ferguson had done such an impressive job decorating her home office that visitors often asked who provided the expertise.
“When I said I did, one lady told me, ‘You must struggle with the left brain-right brain,” she recalled.
And then it hit her.
“That explains why my spread sheets are so pretty,” Ferguson said.
Instead of using plain spreadsheets like most analysts, Ferguson found herself adding color and when she created PowerPoint presentations, she was particular about font sizes and layout and “how pretty” it all looked. Her analytical left brain was trumped by her creative right brain.
There was really nothing all that unusual about that, either. Ferguson, who grew up in Lynchburg, Va., with four siblings, had a knack for doing much with little, turning drab into fab, a trait she inherited from her mother. Growing up in a home with few resources, she said, her mother often moved the furniture around to give it an "update."
And when she went off to Johnson C. Smith University on a track scholarship, Ferguson furnished her dorm room and later a small apartment with items she found at the Goodwill store. Once when a mirror fell from the wall and broke, Ferguson said that instead of throwing it away, she arranged the pieces on the wall to create art.
For the next 25 years, however, Ferguson’s left brain would dominate. When a friend asked her a few years back what she was passionate about, she had no idea.
“I was 45 years old and I couldn’t tell him,” she said.
But she told herself she was simply a late bloomer, to just keep looking. That day in Lowe's, Ferguson gave in to the urging from her right brain and when those first two pieces of dryer duct turned out so well, she returned for more.
This time, instead of placing the duct directly on the wall as she had before, Ferguson mounted it on a 24-by-36-inch white canvas and called the piece “untangled.”
Soon after, she was traveling back to Lynchburg to visit her mother, when she came upon a truck loaded with PVC pipe. Another hunch struck: an entertainment table.
Back in Lawrenceville, she called a friend and described what she saw in her mind’s eye. “He told me how much pipe I needed and I paid him to put it together,” she said.
Hence, the RoLo table, named in her mother’s honor, was born. And so was Ferguson’s true passion.
“Now I can’t even sleep, I have so many ideas,” she said. “It’s always, ‘I can do this and how about this?'"
The other day, Ferguson took a break to show off the manifestations of those right-brain storms. There in her living room just off a small foyer and apart from her first pieces of artwork, was an unnamed 8-by-6-foot piece she fashioned from corrugated metal and decals she bought online.
"When the first piece turned out amazingly well, I continued to buy dryer duct and other home improvement items,” she said. “All of a sudden corrugated metal, washers and gutter guards had become my platform for imaginative transformations.”
How about the small brown chair opposite the sofa?
"I found it on the side of the road one day, stripped it down to the frame and had it reupholstered,” she said, laughing. “I named it the Tappy chair after a close friend that passed away.”
Not all of her cost-cutting efforts have proved successful. Once Ferguson spent hours connecting PVC couplings to hang them on the wall.
"It crashed to the floor," she said. "The couplings were too heavy."
Even so, she said that she can’t imagine ever going back to a furniture store,not with these newfound urges to create.
“I finally discovered my passion,” she said with a big smile. “This is it and I feel like everything is falling in line.”
Last April, Ferguson launched Signature Piecez (www.signaturepiecez), an eclectic line of home décor -- lamps, art and tables -- that she creates in her garage.
“I’m not sure where this will end up but I’d love it if my pieces were to end up in restaurants, hotels, magazines and peoples’ homes,” she said.
That could happen.
Ferguson will show off her handiwork Feb. 17-18 at the Atlanta Expo Center North. The event, called The Next Cool Event, will benefit the What a Life Foundation, which renovates the homes of people with disabilities.
Ferguson’s space will be a modern take on the television sitcom "Sanford and Son," which not so coincidentally featured a junk dealer.
“I’m very excited,” she said. “I used to hear people say if you do what you love, you never work. Now I get it."
Event
The Next Cool Event, 7 p.m. Feb. 17 and 11 a.m.-4 p.m. and 7 p.m.-midnight Feb. 18. Atlanta Exposition Center, 3650 Jonesboro Rd. Atlanta, Ga. 30354.
www.TheNextCoolEvent.com
