Small Caps, Big Cloth: Making Recycled Bottle-Cap Wall Hangings Inspired by El Anatsui

By Soh and Soh Art

A bottle cap is easy to overlook. It is small, light, ordinary, and usually treated as the least important part of a drink. It rolls under tables, collects in kitchen drawers, and disappears into bins without ceremony. Yet in the hands of an artist, that small circular object can become a unit of colour, rhythm, memory, and surface. A single cap may seem insignificant; hundreds of caps can begin to behave like cloth.

This Soh and Soh Art project explores how collected bottle caps can be transformed into a small recycled wall hanging. The idea is inspired by the material intelligence of El Anatsui, the Ghanaian artist whose monumental works made from discarded metal liquor-bottle caps have changed how many people think about sculpture, textile, waste, and value. The project below is not a copy of Anatsui’s work. It is a respectful studio exercise in one of his most powerful principles: when humble objects are repeated, joined, and allowed to move, they can become something larger than themselves.

The environmental context matters. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency describes plastics as a rapidly growing segment of municipal solid waste and reports that the United States generated 35.7 million tons of plastic in 2018, while only three million tons were recycled, an 8.7 percent recycling rate.¹ Globally, the OECD reports that plastic waste generation more than doubled from 2000 to 2019 to 353 million tonnes, and that only 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled.² A wall hanging made from bottle caps will not solve that crisis, but it can help us see packaging differently. It turns the smallest leftovers of consumption into a visible conversation about accumulation, choice, and care.

Why Bottle Caps Work as Recycled Art Material

Bottle caps have three qualities that make them useful for recycled art: repetition, colour, and structure. Plastic caps often arrive in bright colours that can be sorted like a painter’s palette. Metal caps can be flattened, pierced, folded, and joined into shimmering scales. Both types create patterns quickly because they already share a regular size and shape. You do not need to manufacture consistency; the waste stream has already done that.

At the same time, caps carry evidence of everyday life. They may come from a family gathering, a café, a studio clean-up, a picnic, or a community collection jar. That history gives the finished object a social texture. A wall hanging made from caps is not only a decorative surface. It can also become a record of what a household, school, shop, or neighbourhood consumed and chose to notice.

There is also a practical reason to work with caps: they invite modular making. Instead of trying to complete a large artwork in one sitting, you can build it in rows, patches, or small connected units. This makes the project suitable for a slow home studio, a classroom, or a community workshop. Each participant can prepare a section, and the sections can later be joined into a single flexible panel.

The Artist Inspiration: El Anatsui’s Flexible Sculptural Cloths

Art21 states that El Anatsui was born in Anyanko, Ghana, in 1944, and that many of his sculptures are mutable in form, conceived to be free and flexible enough to be shaped differently for each installation.³ Art21 also notes that he has worked with wood, clay, metal, and, more recently, the discarded metal caps of liquor bottles.³ This flexibility is essential. His works may hang like textiles, ripple like metal curtains, fold like ceremonial cloth, or gather into sculptural topographies.

The Saint Louis Art Museum describes Anatsui’s Fading Cloth as more than 10 feet tall and 21 feet long, made from thousands of discarded liquor-bottle caps that were flattened and stitched together with copper wire.⁴ The museum explains that the work uses techniques including flattened cap-neck strips, folded square forms, and basket-weave groupings, all placed into a larger composition.⁴ The result looks textile-like, but it is not cloth. It is a field of reclaimed metal carrying histories of trade, labour, consumption, and transformation.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s page for Anatsui’s Between Earth and Heaven connects the work to West African strip-woven textile traditions, including Kente traditions associated with Ghana, while identifying the medium as aluminum and copper wire.⁵ In the Met’s audio transcript, Anatsui reflects that his process is handmade and time-consuming, and that the work can be shaped in many ways rather than remaining flat like a painting.⁵ This is the lesson a small studio project can learn: recycled material does not have to imitate conventional art supplies. It can keep its own behaviour and still become beautiful.

Studio principle: do not flatten the meaning of an artist’s practice into a quick craft. Let Anatsui’s work teach attention, repetition, labour, flexibility, and respect for material history. Then make your own small object from your own collected materials.

A Small Wall Hanging for the Home Studio

This project creates a modest wall hanging using bottle caps joined into rows and suspended from a dowel, salvaged branch, or narrow timber offcut. Metal caps will produce the most textile-like drape if you can safely flatten and pierce them. Plastic caps can also work, especially when drilled or attached to a recycled backing, but they tend to create a more rigid, graphic surface. If possible, choose one main material for the first attempt so the artwork has visual unity.

Safety and Sorting Before You Begin

Before making, clean the caps in warm soapy water and let them dry completely. Sort them by material, colour, size, and condition. Do not use rusty, dirty, or contaminated caps. If you are working with metal caps, wear eye protection and gloves when flattening or piercing them. Flatten caps gently with pliers or a small hammer on a sturdy surface, keeping fingers clear. If a cap splits, develops sharp burrs, or becomes difficult to control, discard it responsibly rather than forcing it into the artwork.

If you are working with children, avoid sharp metal entirely and use clean plastic caps attached to a backing board or pre-drilled by an adult. The Harn Museum of Art’s educational activity inspired by Anatsui adapts the concept with safer household materials such as aluminum foil, cereal or pizza boxes, paint, scissors, and staples.⁶ That approach is a useful reminder: the goal is not to use the most difficult material, but to understand how repeated recycled pieces can form a larger surface.

Step One: Choose a Pattern Language

Begin with a pattern rather than a picture. A wall hanging works well when it has rhythm: dark to light, warm to cool, dense to open, matte to shiny. Arrange caps on the table in rows and look for natural groupings. Metal caps may offer silver, gold, red, black, and printed fragments. Plastic caps may offer bold circles of blue, white, green, yellow, red, and orange.

For a calm first piece, make a vertical gradient from dark caps at the top to pale caps at the bottom. For a more energetic piece, create diagonal waves or alternating blocks. If your caps come from a community collection, you might keep each contributor’s caps in one row, creating a quiet social map. The best design will feel intentional but not over-controlled.

Step Two: Build Small Modules

Work in modules of four to six caps rather than trying to wire the entire artwork at once. For metal caps, make two small holes near opposite edges. Use wire to connect each cap to the next, leaving a little space so the row can bend. For plastic caps, drill small holes through the sides or attach them to short cord loops. Keep the joins loose enough to move but tight enough to hold the pattern.

This modular approach echoes the logic of larger bottle-cap works without imitating their scale or cultural meaning. The artist’s studio may involve teams, thousands of units, and complex historical references. Your home version can still honour the discipline of repetition. One cap becomes a link. A row becomes a strip. Several strips become a surface. The work grows through attention.

Step Three: Join Rows into a Flexible Panel

Once you have several rows, lay them side by side and connect them at intervals. If you connect every cap too tightly, the panel may become stiff. If you connect too few points, it may tangle. Aim for a balanced grid that can flex when lifted. Hold the panel up occasionally to see how it drapes. Gravity is part of the design.

Attach the top row to a dowel, branch, or frame offcut with wire loops. Leave enough space between loops for the panel to hang evenly. If the work is heavy, add a second support point or mount it inside a shallow frame. The final object should feel secure, especially if it will hang in a busy home.

Step Four: Finish with Light, Shadow, and Space

Hang the finished piece where it can catch shifting light. Metal caps will respond to sunlight, lamps, and movement in the room. Plastic caps create a bolder pop-art surface, especially against a plain wall. Avoid damp areas, direct outdoor exposure, or places where the piece will be touched frequently.

If the back is visible, finish it neatly. Trim wire ends, fold sharp points inward, and check every join. A recycled artwork should not look careless simply because it uses discarded materials. In fact, the opposite is true: the more ordinary the material, the more important the care of the making becomes.

Design Variations

Respecting Inspiration Without Copying

When working from a living artist’s influence, respect matters. El Anatsui’s work is not simply “bottle-cap craft.” It is a major sculptural practice shaped by Ghanaian and Nigerian contexts, West African textile histories, postcolonial memory, trade, labour, and the transformation of cast-off materials. The Saint Louis Art Museum notes that Fading Cloth alludes to the devastating legacy of the transatlantic slave trade through the repurposing of liquor-bottle caps.⁴ That depth should not be reduced to surface decoration.

A respectful home project can acknowledge the source, avoid copying a specific artwork, and focus on learning a method of attention. Use your own collected caps, your own pattern, your own story, and your own scale. The aim is not to make an “Anatsui-style” object for imitation’s sake. The aim is to notice how discarded materials can become flexible, communal, and expressive when treated with seriousness.

Small Objects, Larger Questions

One of the quiet strengths of recycled art is that it makes waste countable. A pile of caps becomes thirty units, then one hundred, then a surface. The numbers are modest compared with global plastic waste, but the act of counting changes the maker. It becomes harder to see packaging as invisible once you have washed, sorted, pierced, wired, and arranged it by hand.

That is why this project belongs at Soh and Soh Art. It joins beauty with responsibility, and craft with reflection. A cap is not only a cap. It is a sign of what passed through our hands. When gathered into a wall hanging, it can become a small cloth of evidence: evidence that we consumed, noticed, slowed down, and chose to make something instead of looking away.

The next time a cap lands on the counter, do not dismiss it immediately. Turn it over. Look at its colour, its edge, its weight, and its shine. Imagine it as one note in a larger rhythm. Then place it in a jar for the studio. Small caps can become big cloth when they are given time, pattern, and care.

References

1. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Plastics: Material-Specific Data.”
2. OECD, “Plastic pollution is growing relentlessly as waste management and recycling fall short, says OECD.”
3. Art21, “El Anatsui.”
4. Saint Louis Art Museum, “Bottle caps symbolize transatlantic slave trade in El Anatsui’s Fading Cloth.”
5. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Between Earth and Heaven.”
6. Harn Museum of Art, “Recycled Sculpture Inspired by El Anatsui.”