Bath’s newly revamped refuse and recycling collections have maybe made us stop and think about rubbish.
Certainly David Attenborough’s BBC production Blue Planet 2 has made some of us aware of the amount of plastic rubbish that makes its way into our oceans to pollute them and destroy the creatures that live on and under it.
Top marks to artist Alison Harper for make a point about our throwaway society in a highly visual way.
She’s holding an exhibition at the BRSLI in Queen Square which is free to visit daily from 10 am to 4pm through to Monday, November 27th.
Alison is an artist currently completing her PhD with practice at Bath School of Art and Design, Bath Spa University, where her thesis includes a study of waste, of the disposable, new materialism and the micropolitical.
In a statement she says of her ‘Lost and Found’ exhibition:
“My work continues to interrogate and question the relationships with the material world we so often take for granted. In order to make I first have to ‘unmake’, revealing the qualities and the quantity of materials implicit in single use objects.
This is a reparative and transformational process, concerned with the ‘disposable’ detritus of everyday life in post-industrial ‘wealthy’ nations.
As artists we hold the world in our hands, a position of privilege which is easily abused, coerced by the allure of a commercialism which is difficult to avoid.
By using the material from these single use objects, which otherwise have no obvious destination; their end of life not having been considered by their producers, I am examining and emphasising the seemingly forgotten connections with our material world, and how this has a bearing on our responsibility towards others, the wider biosphere, and ourselves.”
