Conscientious Objection to Being Thrown Away #3 Print

Conscientious Objection to Being Thrown Away #3, is one of an ongoing series of works made from materials which would otherwise enter the 'waste stream' i.e. end up either in landfill or an incinerator. From June 2016, I decided that our household of two would go zero-waste, at which point I came face-to-face with the non-recyclable, single-use plastic (mostly from food packaging) which previously I had been throwing away without really noticing. It was then that I remembered an artwork by Angela Torenbeek, shown at the 2015 British Museum exhibition: Indigenous Australia. Angela had used ghost nets to make a basket, thus taking the ghost nets out of the marine environment, turning them into something useful, and highlighting the pollution issue: a triple win! I wondered if I might be able to make baskets from the plastic which was accumulating in our kitchen... It turned out that I could! And so began the basket-weaving journey towards less and less non-biodegradable in our lives, and which makes visible the waste which otherwise few of us are aware of. Ideally, I will make myself redundant, by changing my consumption habits to the extent that I no longer have any materials to work with, by which point maybe I will use basket-weaving techniques with bio-degradable materials instead..? Meanwhile these baskets take materials out of the environment and put them to good use, and there is something pleasingly circular about making containers from containers! Traditionally baskets have been made out of waste materials, so applying this process to waste plastic feels entirely appropriate. This basket is made from over 1000 individual items of packaging, and weighs 9kg... NB: I have kept this artwork away from direct sunlight as some plastics degrade in UV light, and due to the nature of the materials, and the lack of information given by the manufacturers (not surprisingly, as the expectation is that the items will be discarded!), I cannot guarantee that the materials are sun-proof, but there has been no visible deterioration in the past year.

Print:Giclee on Photo Paper

Size:8 W x 10 H x 0.1 D in

Size with Frame:13.25 W x 15.25 H x 1.2 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.