Screwed

A project about waste in Britain’s waterways, commissioned by Waterfront, the magazine for the Canal and River Trust. The workshops, and installation, were delivered at Wilderness Festival, Oxfordshire on August 5^th and 6^th 2016.

Every year 8 million tonnes of plastic leak into the world’s oceans. The workshops were designed to provide an experiential learning experience highlighting the problem of abundant waste and litter in the UK, especially plastics. Contributors were guided to thread a length of approximately 80 bottle lids onto fishing line, creating a length of about 1 metre. Nearly 60 people contributed, compiling nearly 60 metres of ‘beaded’ coloured lids. These were then attached to each other and floated on a swimming lake. There they floated around in amongst swimmers, ducks and foliage. After a while they were tethered to each other in a more structured grid to create a floating raft of approx. 2metre x 1.5metre. The ‘sea’ of objects was left floating on the water for a day and night. It was then returned to the Waterfront tent and installed as a display for the duration of the festival.

The resulting spectacle was a comment on the problem of waste & litter that can end up in Britain’s waterways, causing problems for wildlife, being unsightly, and a waste of a valuable resource.

Plastic & synthetic materials are the most common types of water borne debris causing problems for water mammals and birds. Much of the persistent pollution that enters watercourses originates from upriver settlements and travels on currents for thousands of miles, into oceans. Approximately 15,000 pieces of plastic litter are estimated to be floating on every square km of ocean, most of which has originated on land, in developed countries.

Going Round in Circles: Collecting in Coventry

In 2014 I was commissioned to produce a piece of work for a small group exhibition being hosted by the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry. Shed - Collect - Shed was exhibited within the CCCA (the Coventry Centre for Contemporary Art - a shed erected on the mezzanine level of the Museum). The brief was to ‘creatively present found objects relating to Coventry in a way that captures a connection to the Museum’s own collection of archaeological artefacts’. I visited Coventry twice before producing a set of nine pieces of work – exploring using found objects, & representations of them, as a response to the brief.

Coventry has been circled by a ring road since the 1970s, and is also famed for its history of bicycle, car, speedometer and clock production. These circular emblems inspired me to do ‘round’ walks in Coventry, whilst collecting exclusively round objects from the streets to display as part of the ‘Shed – Collect – Shed: Coventry’s Lost & Found’ exhibition. The majority of the objects I found were packaging waste; lots of lost lids and caps, along with other objects like rubber bands, sweets, buttons, washers etc. I collected approximately 200 objects on the same day on four short walks in different areas of the city. They are ostensibly unsurprising ‘finds’, but constitute a true reflection of Coventry life; the remnants and remains discarded or lost, only to be found again on that day in June 2014.

I intended to attach significance to the objects by collecting, cleaning, classifying & re-presenting them in a new setting. Some methods of display are borrowed directly from the Herbert’s exhibition techniques, for example, wiring onto perspex or framing securely within foam. Others are using reproduction techniques to simplify the objects into two-dimensional graphic forms, using their silhouette for solar or screenprints, capturing their memory as a trace.

Like many city centres in England, Coventry is generally very clean - street cleaners are working hard, and there are plenty of bins. This project is not aimed to pass comment on how the council keep a city clean & habitable, or how a city’s population respond to litter, but it can begin to reflect how waste materials are generally undervalued and a disposable culture is seen as a normality. These objects function as contemporary archaeology, permitting a story from a privileged urban society, of many overlooked events, actions and, most importantly, resources.

Shed (v.):

to lose by natural process;

to be rid of (something not wanted or needed)

Collect (v.):

gather together to form a group,

accumulate, assemble

(v.) to regain control of

Shed (n.):

a small structure serving for storage or shelter

(v.) to give or impart; radiate or send forth (light, fragrance,

influence)