Believe it or not, unusual art is worth the collecting

When did the facts of Heidi Hooper's life skew toward what Ripley would dub the "unbelievable"? That's hard to pinpoint.

Hooper graduated from the arts program at Virginia Commonwealth University. "I always saw myself as a sculptor," she said. It was a reasonable expectation.

She still keeps 200 pounds of sculpting wax in her basement in Stroudsburg, Pa. It is more than 20 years old.

In 1999, she developed cancer in her right arm. She lost much of the muscle in her upper arm. She lost the nerves in two fingers and parts of another. Before one surgery, she was worried she would lose her arm altogether.

Since the surgery, her work has been displayed in Alexandria and Richmond and along the East Coast. Her art includes depictions of cats and dogs and Dracula. That is a level of accomplishment, but that fact, by itself, is not unexpected.

Without the use of all of her fingers and worn down by fatigue, Hooper has given up sculpting. For the past decade, lint has been her medium as an artist, and this is where the story turns unbelievable.

When I spoke to her by phone Wednesday, Hooper said she has 457 boxes of lint in her house. It is the exact kind of lint that comes from the dryer, that gets stuck in your belly button, that is composed of your bedspread, favorite T-shirt and, grossly enough, your hair. This has all the makings of a reality-show oddity.

She has so much lint in her Pennsylvania home because people send it to her in the mail. One woman from California, a complete stranger, sent her envelopes of lint with no return address for a year. The boxes are sorted by color. She has 30 boxes alone to cover the narrow spectrum from tan to brown.

Hooper sketches birds and cats and dogs and Marilyn Monroe and, as if they were paint-by-number worksheets, colors them in with pills of lint. When she first tried showing her work, the galleries she approached were disgusted.

"Dryer lint?" they asked? "Yuck. No." That fact is 100 percent, absolutely believable.

At art festivals, Hooper would stand outside her exhibit as people guessed that her artwork was fashioned from acrylic or handmade paper, and she would watch their amazement when they learned that the detail work and texture came from the clothes they were wearing.

Today, her smaller works sell for hundreds of dollars. They have won accolades and judges awards at art shows and science-fiction conventions. But eBay has proven there's a market for everything - so, again, that is believable.

Thursday, Hooper and her art will be on display at the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum in Williamsburg. She will put on a short demonstration, until her right arm becomes too fatigued to work any longer.

There is something ordinary and expected about Hooper's story, a familiar thread to the narrative that we take for granted. A woman with cancer survives and makes artworks from an unexpected medium and sells them for hundreds of dollars.

It doesn't strike me as completely unbelievable. Bizarre, yes. Quirky, sure. A bit unhygienic, if your lint trap looks anything like mine. But it is plausible.

"The art culture has changed," Hooper said. "So much more is accepted now than it ever was."

And maybe that is what is most shocking about Hooper's opening this week: we are not so easily shocked.

"There are things you can see on YouTube that are a lot more disturbing than what you'll see in my museum. And I'm OK with that," said Scott Hart, the general manager of the Ripley's in Williamsburg.

A rendering of Ray Charles, made of threads scavenged from our dryers, from the smallest pieces of our socks and towels? Oh? That's nice.

The unexpected, the unbelievable, the unthinkable happen every day, and we take them for granted. We believe it more often than not.

Mike Gruss, (757) 446-2277, mike.gruss@pilotonline.com