Rubbish

Axisweb Curated Prize

As part of my research for the Axisweb Curated Prize, I interview the artists in my selection on their use of rubbish/waste/discards.

Interview with Lousie Winter (part 1)

AB: Why do you work with rubbish/trash/discards?

LW: My interest in collecting rubbish and other discarded material stems from my exploration of the relationship between site and non-site (the site being the actual physical environment from where the material is collected and the non-site being the displaced material which is then placed in a different context). The emerging dialectic, where the constructs of site and non-site enter into a dialogue as to how the position of objects can change, questions the spatial confines of the gallery, our assumptions of reality and the location of stable material within it. For this reason I am continually drawn to rubbish. It is also important that I don’t create objects as such, but work with already existing matter in an attempt to collapse the distance between art and the mundane, exploring the poetic and absurd potential of the everyday.

AB: Do you have a preferred term for those materials?

LW: I usually refer to the materials I collect as found objects which relates much more to the process of their acquisition. The term rubbish is relative in the sense that, by its very definition, it is that which is considered worthless, and, based on that assumption, is rejected. The cliché ‘one mans trash is another mans treasure’ seems appropriate here and clichés are, after all, rooted in truths.

At the same time it can be a humorous and disarming way of introducing your work to someone by describing it as rubbish! Do you sell your work? No. Why? Because its rubbish. It’s that kind of deadpan humour that I invoke with the titles of my work which operate purely on the level of description by simply stating what they are.

AB: Where do you source your materials from?

LW: The sites I use are very much non-places. They are usually subject to social and economic estrangement and are consequently marginal and overlooked. This includes abandoned collieries, quarries, derelict buildings and other such sites. I choose these sites for their relative isolation and because material is allowed to gather, in the same way that dust collects in an undisturbed corner of a room.

AB: What criteria do you have when sourcing your materials?

LW: When I am at a given site I try to be as open as possible in terms of what I collect. I work on the premise of collecting or photographing anything that is of basic interest to me so potentially nothing is excluded. Having said that, I do find that I am particularly drawn to fragments of things as opposed to things in their entirety, things that are barely distinguishable as what they formerly were or have undergone some kind of transformation or deteriorisation. This quality not only imbues the materials with a rich sense of history but also releases them from their meaning and context thereby allowing for their re-interpretation. It is this propensity for the familiar to become unfamiliar that interests me.

Axisweb Curated Prize

As part of my research for the Axisweb Curated Prize, I interview the artists in my selection on their use of rubbish/waste/discards.

Interview with Maurice Carlin

AB: Why do you work with rubbish/trash/discards?

MC: I collect failed and discarded photocopies left behind at copyshops and publish these in a periodical called The Self Publisher. While the specific context of this material is very narrow in that it only forms a snap shot of those who have needed to use a particular duplicating service on a particular day, the array of material is broad and speaks clearly about a people and a location, about motivation, action and work.

My practice seeks out the peripheral view, exploring things that have often been missed, left or lost. In some cases these are actual objects or materials, in others it is a situation or simply a moment. I find the anonymous histories and unknown back-stories of these situations interesting. Beyond the materials and circumstances themselves, I am often more interested in their provisional and transitory nature, the factors that have created their existence and what this could mean for the present.

AB: Do you have a preferred term for those materials?

MC: I don’t really consider that I am working with ‘rubbish’ in the Self Publisher. It may just be a matter of what different words/terms might suggest but I would usually say ‘left’ or ‘discarded’ material. For a few early issues of the magazine, I experimented with other words/terms that could mean the same thing but that might open up the possibilities of potential meaning a little. So I used terms like ‘the leavings’ or ‘collected leftovers’

AB: Where do you source your materials from?

MC: Photocopy shops local to where I am at any given time. I have generally produced the magazine in Manchester/Salford where I am based but have also produced issues while on artist residencies or when visiting, Antwerp, Barcelona, London and Macerata in Italy. I have also produced copies in other circumstances such as the 2009 student protests at Middlesex University Philosophy department. Myself and a group of Islington Mill Art Academy members visited the campus to offer some support to the philosophy students who had occupied their building and were protesting at the proposed closure of the well respected Philosophy course at Middlesex. The students were producing an overwhelming volume of material on the buildings photocopier to get their message out to the world so I offered to catalogue some of it for them in a special edition of ‘Self Publisher’.

AB: What criteria do you have when sourcing your materials?

MC: The concept is that the material comes from a copyshop, a place where the (re) copying and distributing of information is taking place. I simply intervene and collect the surplus from this process. I collect everything that has been left behind.

AB: What processes do you apply to/with these materials?

MC: I usually publish everything that I collect. The breadth and dissonance of the subject matter is ‘equalised’ by the action of sequencing the materials together into the pages of a magazine, this combined with the black and white ‘sameness’ generated by the photocopying effect. Pages that have had no previous association start to ‘communicate’ with each other. I try to keep my intervention to a minimum and re-publish the work as I found it. Elements of unavoidable subtle ordering creep into the process, where I place one thing after another that might have some arbitrary connection.

AB: What context do you show your work in? (eg gallery space/public space/internet)

MC: I have shown this work only in galleries, usually in the form of a number of issues displayed to be read or leafed through. Sometimes I have produced a special edition for a particular show as in a show at Banner Repeater in London in 2011 and also as a result of a residency in Antwerp in 2010. I am open to showing it in other contexts but haven’t really had the opportunity as of yet.

AB: What happens to the materials/work afterwards?

MC: I keep everything!

Axisweb Curated Prize

As part of my research for the Axisweb Curated Prize, I interview the artists in my selection on their use of rubbish/waste/discards.

Interview with Hilary Jack

AB: Why do you work with rubbish/trash/discards?

HJ: I like old objects sometimes in preference to new. I often wear second hand/ vintage clothes and collect all manner of old objects for my home. I also have three found rescue dogs. As an artists I work with discarded objects and would rarely manufacture or fabricate a new work. Working with objects already available to me in the world is a small anti consumer, activist statement. I believe we discard too many objects that could be repaired or reused. Sometimes I see an object and gives me an idea for a new piece or a whole series of work. I use mainly broken and found objects which reference the concept of built in obsolescence and highlight the way we live our lives today.

AB: Do you have a preferred term for those materials?

HJ: In my artists statement I say that I work with broken, abandoned materials.

AB: Where do you source your materials from?

HJ: I collect objects from ebay charity shops and the street. More erecently Ive been working with objects from the natural world, fallen twigs and branches and logs discarded from sustainable and industrialised forests.

AB: What criteria do you have when sourcing your materials?

HJ: I’m drawn to objects that have a strong sense of human presence, a single glove, a broken umbrella, a headless china figurine. Im interested in the history and life span of these lost and broken materials. How they came to be produced, how they came to be lost or discarded and their shifting value.

AB: What processes do you apply to/with these materials?

HJ: I use these found objects in small scale sculptures, sculptural installations, public interventions and web based projects which reference the journey these objects have made from, conception through to production, consumption, obsolescence and decay.

AB: What context do you show your work in?

HJ: …. in gallery spaces, in the public domain, outside and on the internet

AB: What happens to the materials/work afterwards?

HJ: Some of my work is left to decay in situ, other work is stored for future exhibition. My most recent piece of work “Empty Nest” a giant scale birds nest sited in a 200 year old tree in Tatton Park for the The Tatton Park Biennial of Contemporary Art, has been exhibited for six months and stored, ready to be reconstructed at Compton Verney for their annual programme in March 2013. It will stay there for the rest of its natural life.

Rubbish research in Axisweb’s cast out MAP Magazine archive (part 2):

MAP Issue 17, Spring 2009 (p.88)

Review: Superflex, South London Gallery, 16 January – 1 March.

Kate Cowcher reviews Superflex’s film Flooded McDonald’s. “Certianly waste-generating, waist-expanding global corporations such as McDonald’s share in the blame for climate chaos but Superflex’s film is no place for smug moralising. The line between beautiful and grotesque, funny and frightening, hero and villain, is perilously porous and yet complacency is not an option.”

http://superflex.net/floodedmcdonalds/

MAP Issue 21, Spring 2010 (p.69)

Ben Rivers on Tuvalu where he visited to shoot footage for his video Slow Action (2010): “I don’t think there is much in the country: a bunch of semi-submerged islands, some leftover second world war machinery, and a society that can’t afford to get rid of its rubbish, and so the detritus floats around the feet of the houses (no help from Britain who tossed it aside after being its colonial usurper).”

Ben River interview at Picture This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wng4jk_vXns

MAP issue 22, Summer 2010 (p44-49)

Chapter One is a feature of Mexican artist Martin Soto Climent by Dominic Paterson. The cover image of this issue is Soto Climent’s Impulsive Chorus (2009). “Empty beer cans are arranged in a cosy circle, their open ‘mouths’ inevitably bringing to mind the communal singing which their contents might have fuelled. […] Cans, bottles, cutlery, boxes, purses, bags, wigs, underwear, tights, shoes: the things which Soto Climent is attracted tend to be objects of consumption, it4sm of clothing or accessories. Perhaps, most significantly, these objects all lead back to the body, as proxies or as metonymic figures.”

http://www.vvork.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/MASC153-1024×767.jpg

MAP issue 22, Summer 2010 (p.76/77)

A feature on GI Festival mentions Christoph Büchel’s LAST MAN OUT TURN OFF LIGHTS at Tramway: “Inside the maw of this huge industrial space, shipping containers have been converted into jail cells, the main hall is filled with the exoskeleton of a crashed jet with bunt out seats. A rank buring smell fills the space. It’s a terrifying reconstruction of sorts, and produces an omnipresent sense of dread.”

http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/kiameku/2359392257/1/tumblr_ldmiufLaWk1qbt4hl

Back in May, Axisweb announced they were having a clear out of their books and publications in their Leeds office, inviting their membership to get in touch if they wanted anything as they were going digital. This was just before Holmfirth Arts Festival where Vanessa Haley and I were curating the Towser Bothy which featured an artists’ book and zine library and a dry stone wall bar. I got to Leeds as quickly as possible. Amongst the haul of artists’ books and zines which went into the Library were several back issues of MAP Magazine. They’ve been sat in my studio waiting to be read for months, and finally I got round to taking a look with a specific research intent.

Here are my rubbish findings in the rejected magazines (part 1):

MAP Issue 2, Summer 2005 (p.55)

A review of Tomoko Takahashi’s exhibition My Playstation at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 22 February – 10 April 2005, by Donald Hutera: This exhibition by the 2002 Turner Prize shortlistee “comprised around 7600 objects collected, donated or found over a period of months, which Takahashi painstakingly sorted and arranged throughout the Serpentine […] The waste and decadence underpinning Takahashi’s show were redeemed on the final day via a beautifully-managed take-away, in which the public was invited to come and cart off the gallery’s contents.”

http://www.voltashow.com/uploads/pics/Tomoko_Takahashi__My_play-station_at_Serpentine_-Office__East_Gallery____2005.jpg

MAP Issue 3, Autumn 2005 (p.19)

In the Graduates 2005 section under Aberdeen, David MacRaild’s sculpture Need Not Want Not gets a mention: “A collection of detritus from around his studio has been encased in a one-mtere cube of translucent resin and placed on a wooden pallet.”

http://www.artlink.com/DBImages/1759_Need%20Not,%20Want%20Not.jpg

MAP Issue 4, Winter 2005/6 (p.6)

Moira MacLean’s wallpaper installation at An Lanntair, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis

MacLean is self-described as ‘a domestic archaeologist’ and ‘a wallpaper pirate’. “I started collecting wallpaper from derelict houses more than a decade ago.”

http://northings.com/files/2011/04/moira-maclean-265×400.jpg

MAP Issue 16, Winter 2008/9 (p.50-55)

The Recycling the Ruins feature on French artist Cyprien Gaillard looks at his first exhibition in a British institution; the Glasgow 2014 project at the Hayward, London. “When Tom Morton, curator of the project, invited me to show in this space [Hayward’s project space], I decided to make one of these monuments I’ve been wanting to make for a long time, using recycled concrete from a demolished tower block up in Glasgow. We shipped about 30 tons of concrete from a demolished tower block to London and I assembled this rubble into the shape of an obelisk. It’s called ‘Cenotaph to 12 Riverford Road, Pollokshaws, Glasgow’, which is the name of the building demolished this summer.”

http://haywardprojectspace.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/cyprien-gaillard-glasgow-2014.html