Blowing Our Own Trumpets!

Ecological Footprint Project

Extracting from just one month’s worth of glass, metal, card and plastic recycling generated in the home, I placed the items on the paving outside my house, and used them as stencils to capture their trace. A record of the resources used, and despite their disposal, me and my family are reminded of our ‘ecological footprint’ as we repeatedly walk across the imagery of the resources spent. An 'ecological footprint' is defined as "the impact of a person or community on the environment, expressed as the amount of land required to sustain their use of natural resources". [I used discarded spray paint donated by the local school].

Ego to Eco: we are nature

The Ego to Eco project was created by Joanna Rucklidge (Visual Communicator) and Elizabeth Freeman (Eco-psychologist) who share a mutual interest in work about nature connection, environmental issues and wellbeing. They wanted to engage in cross-disciplinary and transformative educational research to create a new way of engaging students with nature, the environment and wellbeing, whilst also enhancing the student experience. 

The project was designed to provoke a psychological transformation among a group of visual communication students. Nature was used as a subject, an experience and a concept to allow students to explore the significance it had to them and to society over a series of creative tasks. These involved writing, image making, time in nature, discussion, research and finally creating an outcome for an audience.

Short video of the exhibition

The Ego to Eco exhibition website

Cast Away

Cast Away

Heraklion, Crete, June 2019

This project involved collecting plastic waste that had been swept onto two different beaches in Heraklion. In just two hours, nearly 2,000 pieces of debris were collected. One million disposable plastic bottles are opened every minute around the world and lids are the most common form of plastic found on beaches. Using the lids from the collected rubbish, they were printed and painted on a wall above a municipal dustbin to represent the quantity, colours and nature of how they were found as scattered litter; inappropriately disposed of. The lids themselves were tethered and hung in a redundant window frame within the wall. The aim was to draw attention to the global issue surrounding plastic waste being ‘cast away’ and becoming stranded on beaches around the world.

Rubbish Prints

Rubbish Prints

Collograph Prints, Sheffield 2018

Images of flattened litter from the streets of Sheffield are captured by inking them and pressing them in a hydraulic press, capturing the detail of their function, texture and degradation.

Can Be Recycled Animation

Can Be Recycled

Stop frame Animation, Sheffield 2018

Single use drinks cans are usually made from aluminium. This is a material made by mining bauxite, a mineral found in tropical parts of the world. This is processed into alumina, which is then smelted to produce aluminium alloy. It can be remelted and reused an infinite number of times. without losing quality. Recycling aluminium uses 5% of the energy needed to make primary aluminium. This stop frame animation made from collograph prints of car crushed cans found on Sheffield streets, is aimed to highlight the malleable, adaptable and valuable material that cans are made from.