The artist from Lake Placid turns decommissioned skis, poles and snowboards into chairs, jewelry and household items. Her products are now on display for purchase at the Tupper Arts Center.

She started building ski chairs in 2005 after seeing a crumbling ski chair while at Whiteface.

“I said, ‘I can do better than that,'” Rast said.

She used to collect skis from the North Elba Transfer Station where people would dump their old pairs and employees would save them. Now, she’s got a donation rack at Green Goddess in Lake Placid. She estimates there’s 500 pairs of skis at her home workshop, a garage that was supposed to hold a car.

Anne Rast sits in one of her ski chairs at the Tupper Arts Center. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Cerbone)

Growing up, Rast was one of six siblings.

“All I wanted to do as a kid was ski,” she said. “I got one pair of skis that weren’t hand-me-downs as a kid, so when I moved here and I saw them being thrown out I was like, ‘No, no, no. We can’t let that go in the trash.’ So I started collecting them.”

She thinks this is quite “Freudian.” She always wanted skis in her youth and now she’s surrounded herself with hundreds of them.

She organizes them into groups, color-coordinating her chairs and placing similar designs together.

“It’s like crayons. You get to play with all different colors,” she said.

Anne Rast’s art is all made using old skis or snowboards. Here, she has earrings, zipper pulls, bottle openers, coat hangers, magnets and clocks. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Cerbone)

Skis are pieces of expression on the slopes. Their unique colors and patterns are evident in Rast’s necklaces or magnets, cut out of larger designs and recontextualized.

Holding a bottle opener cut from an old downhill ski, Rast wondered, “Where are the mountains that it skied on? And who was it? Did they fall a lot? Did they have a fun time?”

She’s built several “memorial chairs” for families who have had a member die, turning their old skis and snowboards into art carrying their memory.

Rast cares a lot about being creative and original. When she sees a new way to create something using a ski she doesn’t like to just take someone else’s template. She expands on it or tries to make her own design.

“That last 5% that you put into something is really key,” she said. “It’s the difference between good and excellent.”

Anne Rast sits in one of her ski chairs at the Tupper Arts Center. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Cerbone)

Rast said her mother was supportive of her artistic dreams, but made her go to nursing school. Rast said, “OK, but I want to do art.”

She went back to college and trained as an illustrator and designer.

Rast said ski art has been a hobby for her since 2005. She took a break for a few years to take care of her late mother when she fell ill. When Rast left a 19 year job at AdWorkshop in Lake Placid in 2019 her art became a full-time job.

She’s a graphic designer and illustrator by trade. She’s worked with a slew of art mediums throughout her life, but carpentry was new to her. She said she’s mostly self-taught.

Though she’s limited herself to the scope of skis in her current art, she’s found many ways to use them.

She has a massive variety of functional and ornamental art: magnets, earrings, bracelets, bottle openers, zipper pulls, wind chimes, coat racks, key racks, ornaments, rings, clocks, beer flights and wall-mounted bottle openers, which put the binding to use cracking open brews.

Tupper Arts Director Louise McNally grabbed a bottle from the back so Rast could demonstrate. It was an Ubu Ale from the Lake Placid Pub & Brewery. Rast said she designed the Adirondack chair seen on popular beer’s bottle caps in her career, adding that she thinks its funny to see her work scattered on the ground as she walks around.

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What’s old is new again

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By repurposing ski remnants from her work on chairs on these other, smaller pieces she puts the whole ski to use.

“I try to throw away as little as possible,” Rast said.

She’s passionate about recycling, reusing and upcycling.

“I really am quite disgusted, actually, by how much stuff is thrown away. We’ve become a disposable society,” she said.

When something gets thrown away it goes out of sight, she said, but it just ends up in a dump in “someone else’s backyard.”

As a child, Rast’s parents would bring her to pick up trash on the beach and clean it up. They instilled her mentality of reducing waste by creating with it.

Rast said while she gets a lot of her material for free, what people buying her chairs or earrings are paying for is the hours of labor she puts into them.

Rast said it’s hard to satisfy the creative side of being an artist, while paying the bills.

And, of course, she also wants to be able to afford a Whiteface lift pass.