It was the holiday season in highschool, and I was joke-pitching Christmas present ideas to my friends. As I declared trash as the perfect gift, my need to mask school-cafeteria-breath with chewing gum led to a new art medium: the gum wrapper. Hypnotically shiny and easy to shape, gum wrappers became my most treasured form of trash. Amongst the classic silver wrappers gleams 5 Gum – a brand whose wrappers were as colorful as Lisa Frank. My first creation was a simple Christmas tree and since then, I have fashioned everything from chemical titrations to my University graduation cap out of trash. Unfortunately in today’s world, 5 Gum now only produces a few wrapper colors, terminating the gum wrapper artform. Luckily my hoarding of colorful wrappers has left me with enough colors to turn one last pile of trash into treasure.