BALTIMORE — Cyclist Barnaby Wickham collected more than 700 lost tire caps, most of them while biking around Baltimore. They inspired a quest to turn trash into art, including Christmas wreaths, a giant fish and a large Snoopy head.
It is a hobby that developed nearly two years ago from his love of cycling and the joy of making something out of the waste he collected.
“I think that’s kind of the thrill of fishing, for one thing,” Wickham said. “I love riding a bike. I love Baltimore. I love being out in Baltimore, and there are enough tire covers and other things like car grills to be interesting, but not so many that it’s too easy.”
Wickham, 54, says he can’t quite explain it, but one day while out on a bike ride in early 2024, he decided to bring home his missing tire cap. Since then, he has started attaching tire covers he comes across to his backpack.
“I track them, and I have a Google map,” he said. “I pin locations where I find each one of them.”
Others in his community who showed interest in his projects told him when they saw tire covers on the road. Now, Wickham keeps a list of them that he refers to as “pivoting hats in the wild.”
He wants to do the collecting himself. This is part of the joy.
Wickham also gets help from his wife, Kate, who helps carry materials during construction and offers opinions.
“I’m just the support team, sometimes the cautious one who says, ‘You can’t drive on this road, you can’t bike on this road or whatever.’ So I support his love of trying new things,” she said.
It may seem like a weird pastime, but Baltimore is known to celebrate its weird side. The city is famous for director John Waters, whose eccentric films earned him the nickname “Pope Trash.” Baltimore is also home to the Museum of American Visual Art, which is nationally recognized as a repository of works by self-taught artists and intuitive art.
Wickham, who works in marketing for a defense technology company, stores his finds in his garage and works in his front yard. Expanded metal is used as a frame, with metal sheets with holes and wires to hold the sheets in place. It uses zip ties to attach the hub caps to the sheet metal.
“It’s all linked to zip ties,” he said. “The tire covers are full of holes or holes, so they are easy to grip to hold in place.”
His works are great. Snoopy’s head is 16 feet (4.9 m) long and about 21 feet (6.4 m) wide.
While most of the tire covers he uses are found in Baltimore, Wickham expands his range when he travels. Visits to see his son at Kent State University added a few tire covers of Ohio origins. A business trip to Italy, which included a bike tour of Rome, yielded a discovery. Wickham had to explain to his guide why he was interested in taking her.
“And I said to myself, ‘Oh, I’ve collected this stuff. I’ll just take it with me.’ And I showed her a picture of the wreath, and she was like, ‘Oh, okay.'” “Whenever someone hears about this and understands it, they join in,” Wickham said.
Wickham donated two Christmas wreaths he made last year, one to the city and one to a nonprofit.
Wickham said the hobby led to interactions with city residents. On one trip, a man saw him carrying a tire cap and motioned persistently for him to come to him. He wanted to tell him there was another tire cap nearby.
“It was clear to him that I was collecting these things, and all he wanted to do was help, point one out to me. There’s a lot of that,” Wickham said.
“It starts a lot of conversations, and it’s just something people like to talk about,” he said.