There is a children’s book by Sergio Ruzzlier called “The Room of Wonders.”

It is about a young anthropomorphic rodent named Pius Pelosi who makes a sort of museum out of the random objects he stumbles across and takes an interest in. He ends up dismantling the museum after some visitors mock him for his devotion to these whatnots.

Don’t worry; the story ends on a hopeful note.

Moral of the story: Tell the trolls to get back under their bridges.

When I think about Lisa Vetter’s and Paul Siefert’s Spencerville home and studio called The Art Farm (which I have not yet visited), I imagine that it must contain at least one room of wonders and probably more.

Vetter and Siefert are artists who work in the medium of found objects. Found objects are objects that, when found, may have outlived an initial usefulness. What Vetter and Siefert do is usher these objects into a new period of usefulness.

Which is to say, Vetter and Siefert make functional art, meaning art that has a function beyond its aesthetic qualities.

This often means clocks and lamps, but it can also mean pot racks, toilet paper holders, earrings and cufflinks.

The duo doesn’t always know what sort of art they are going to make when they see something at a thrift shop and think, “I need to make this into art.”

“Sometimes we know exactly how we might use something,” Vetter said, “and other times, it’s just something really cool and interesting. We might not know yet how we’re going to use it, but it’s coming into the mix.”

Hence, my hypothesis about a room or rooms of wonders into which Vetter and Siefert gaze and wonder.

Sometimes, Vetter & Siefert create funky figures (aka whimsical statuettes) that aren’t strictly functional, but if you acquire one and start feeling affectionate toward it and start telling it your troubles when no is around (you know, just hypothetically; don’t assume that I am writing from experience here, not that there would be anything wrong with that), then it has acquired a significant function in your world.

These funky figures have proven quite popular, although the duo would prefer that people not call them robots, as some folks are wont to do.

Vetter & Siefert travel to a lot of juried art fairs throughout the year and most of the people they encounter really seem to love their work.

But loving and buying are different things.

“It’s one thing to see it in an art fair and be like, ‘Oh my gosh! I love this stuff! This is so cool,'” Vetter said. “It’s another thing to say, ‘I’m putting that in my home.’ When it clicks, it clicks. People are just like, ‘Oh, yeah. I want that.'”

Vetter said that found objects come with an energy that translates into the new work.

“Like how many hors d’oeuvres were served on that platter that I just turned into a clock?” she said. “Or, what was stored in this beautiful old tin that I’ve just cut apart to use for something else? I love that.”

Vetter has no qualms about taking something that had one use and putting it to another.

“In fact, I kind of love that challenge,” she said. “Because people are like, ‘I never would have thought of that.’ It sparks something in people when they see this thing that’s used for this purpose now being used in a completely different way. It kind of sparks the imagination.”

Vetter hopes it gets people thinking about finding new functions for things they’d always assumed had reached the end of their functionality.

“God, we live in such a throwaway world,” she said. “So, I am just a freak about repurposing everything…We’ve been going green since before it was cool. Like, we started making found object work 25 years ago. And, you know, there were a lot of people doing it, but there are a lot more people doing it now. It has become really much more mainstream and fashionable.”

When you throw something away, there really is no “away,” Vetter said.

“When you throw something away, it has gone away from you, but it still exists in our environment,” she said. “It’s finite, the space that we have. Think about what

you’re throwing away. Could you reuse it? Could you donate it? Could somebody else use it?”

Before Vetter and Siefert acquired what they did not yet know would one day be called the Art Farm, they lived in the downtown area in a small, two-bedroom bungalow.

“Our art studio had just pretty much taken over the house,” she said. “We were living in our studio. And so we’re like, ‘Okay, something’s got to shift, because this is not sustainable.'”

They thought briefly of leaving town altogether and then they decided to search for properties out in the Hoosier countryside.

“I just started kind of sniffing around,” she said, “and they sent me some listings. Most of them were like, ‘No, I’m not looking for anything in a subdivision. I believe I mentioned that.’ But this farm was one of them that they sent. So we drove out here and looked at it. We were like, ‘Oh, my God.’ I mean, the house is small, the building right behind it was perfect for the studio. And then there was the barn. And Paul was like, ‘I want that barn.'”

It had been Amish-owned, so there was no heat, no running water and no electricity.

“It was pretty raw,” Vetter said. “It was gonna need some love. It was gonna need some work. But we’d rehabbed a couple of rooms in the old house in town, and we were like, ‘Yeah, we can do this.'”

An artist friend visited from Ann Arbor and unwittingly spoke the property’s new name into being.

“She felt excited looking at this crazy project that we just put ourselves into,” Vetter recalled.  “And she said, ‘You have an Art Farm!’  And I’m like, ‘That’s it. Yes, we do.'”

The Art Farm in Spencerville has almost never just been a home and studio. For one thing, Vetter and Siefert had started doing pop-up art shows in town before anyone used the term pop-up to refer to anything not coming out of a toaster.

At the Art Farm, shows that popped-up could stay popped up longer.

“Once we got moved into the house, we were able to set it up and leave it up for weeks, not just a weekend,” Vetter said. “Then we started doing (the Art Farm Holiday Pop Up Gallery) the whole month of December. We’d do a Friday opening reception, and that was really popular and very well attended. But I’d been thinking, ‘Is anybody going to come out here if we do it? Well, let’s just try it.’ And they came so that now it’s evolved into keeping it open until mid-January.”

Vetter and Siefert branched into doing a Valentine’s pop-up and a spring equinox show. They’ve held art workshops and welcomed guest artists. They have played host to field trip excursions from Whitney Young Early Childhood Center and Canterbury School and Vetter said she would like to do more programs for children.

“Some of those kids that live in the inner city, they’ve never been out of the city,” she said. “One kid one time said, ‘I think you can see the whole state of Indiana from here.'”

Vetter and Siefert have built a life for themselves that prompts people to say to them, “You live a charmed life.”

But building a charmed life is not about waving a magic wand.

“We have worked really, really hard to get what we have,” she said. “People will say… ‘You’re so lucky. This is so amazing. I wish I had your life.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, you know what? Be careful what you wish for.’

“Here’s my famous quote when we people will ask us, you know, ‘Can you make a living doing this?’ And I say, ‘No. We make a life.'”

On September 14, Vetter and Siefert will host the Country Chitlin Circuit, an event devised by Indiana Poet Laureate Curtis L. Crisler. It will involve music, poetry readings and the visual arts. It starts at 6:30 pm at the Art Farm, 17612 E. County Line Road, Spencerville. You can connect with Vetter and Siefert at artfarmindiana.com