Bristol woman turns waste into crocodile art

Some people have ornamental gnomes in their gardens. Katcha Bilek has a family of crocodiles.

The bask of crocodiles – to use the correct collective noun – resides in the front garden of Katcha's home overlooking Victoria Park in South Bristol.

"We're always seeing people stopping to look at them. The other day there was a guy standing outside the window, pointing to the crocodiles and giving a thumbs up," she says.

It is not only passers-by in Bristol who have been impressed with 36-year-old Katcha's unusual reptile sculptures, which are made from old car and bike tyres, guttering and spoons.

Soon she will be taking the crocodile with yellow teeth to the World Wildlife Trust at the London Wetlands. It will remain there for nearly a year, as one of the displays at the Love London Recycled Sculpture Show which begins on June 4.

The invitation to exhibit her work at the show is the latest in a series of achievements for Katcha, who works as an artist using recycled materials.

She was recently selected as one of the Future 500 in a scheme run by Courvoisier and the Observer newspaper to identify potential leaders aged between 25 and 40.

And the recycled products such as bags, belts and jewellery that she makes at her studio in Bristol, are now sold by stockists in London, Barcelona, Berlin and Prague, as well as from her website.

Katcha credits her mother, Ros, for inspiring her to put unwanted materials to new uses in her career as an artist and designer.

She says: "My mum's a hoarder. I think it's her British post-wartime mentality. She can't bear to throw anything away.

"I was always brought up not to waste. That was a really big thing in our house. There used to be so much stuff around when I was a kid that I started making things from it."

Katcha's mother Ros was brought up in Britain, while her father Josef is from Czechoslovakia.

Katcha says: "He left Czechoslovakia in 1968 when the Russians came, and ended up in London where he met my mum.

"They went to Holland, and my dad worked as a technical writer. I came to Bristol to study archaeology at Bristol University."

Katcha did not complete her degree course, but instead ended up travelling around the world, making a living out of selling her recycled wares.

Katcha returned to Bristol in 2006 after becoming pregnant and deciding that she wanted to settle down somewhere.

Her son Clyde is now almost two, and he is used to seeing her cutting up old tyres in the back garden, or sewing recycled materials on her sewing machine.

She makes her bags in a studio, and has recently expanded into creating shelving units and seating from old perspex signs, bicycle wheel rims, and car seat belts.

"These were made from an old KFC sign that had been chucked out," says Katcha, gesturing to a red shelving unit in the corner of the sitting room.

"It's probably the closest I've ever come to getting a KFC takeaway in any sense!"

Katcha was making belts out of old bicycle tyres when she got the idea for making ornamental crocodiles.

She says: "I was making belts out of bicycle tyres, and I realised that the treads looked like the back of a crocodile.

"I make the skin for the crocodiles from old car and bike tyres, their teeth are from old guttering, and their eyes are from old spoons.

"I get old tyres and wheels from a bike shop, and from a car breakers on Feeder road, where I also get seat belts and inner tubes to make bags.

"People are happy to give them to me, because they'd otherwise have to pay someone to take them away."

The crocodiles in Katcha's front garden range in size between three and four metres. However, she makes them to order in different sizes.

She says: "They work well in a zoo or park, or as seating in a children's playground. The big ones work well as a bench. I had the crocodiles at the Shambala Festival and at Glastonbury last year. The kids adored them and were climbing all over them, while their parents sat down on them for a rest."