My art isn’t about zero emissions. It’s about pollution! The waste we leave behind, the things we throw away, and the damage that becomes easy to ignore when it’s out of sight.
That concern has been with me since I was a child. I saw people in my own family discard things that might have been repaired, and I wanted to change that somehow. I recycled what I could. I fixed old televisions, lawnmowers, broken toys and whatever else I could get working again. Even then, I felt there was something wrong with treating useful things as rubbish just because they had stopped working properly.
As an adult, I still look for people who share that concern. I follow Fantastic Plastic, Beau Miles, Precious Plastic, and organisations such as The Bower and Australia’s repair café movement. They each approach waste in their own way, but they all make me think about what we can do with the things we already have. Repair cafés, for example, bring people together to fix household items and pass on practical skills.
I hope my work can help more people in my community look at waste differently. Recycling matters, but it can’t be the whole answer. We also need to question why so many products are made to be used briefly and discarded, and why repairing something can seem harder than replacing it.
The problem is bigger than a full rubbish bin. It’s a failure in how we think about materials, value and responsibility. We have learned to accept “disposable” as ordinary—as if an object disappears once we throw it away.
It doesn’t. It goes somewhere.
That is what I want my art to bring into view. Disposable is dangerous.
