Bytes: Trash Art

Sunday, February 18, 2018

Trash Art

I have previously posted pics and stories of art works made out of garbage and discarded items. Here are some more examples:

_______________

Bordallo II:

Bordaio II, 37, is a Portuguese artist using trash to highlighty waste issues. Having started as an illegal graffiti artist, he is now involved in what he calls “Big Trash Animals”. This is a series of artworks that aims to draw attention to waste production, materials that are not reused, pollution and its effect on the planet. The idea is to depict nature itself, in this case animals, out of materials that are responsible for its destruction. These works are built with end-of-life materials: the majority found in wastelands, abandoned factories or randomly and some are obtained from companies that are going through a recycling process. Damaged bumpers, burnt garbage cans, tyres and appliances are just some of the objects used to bring home the message.

Gallery:

_______________

Mandy Barker makes photographic murals out of what she calls SOUP, the name given to plastic debris suspended in the ocean. The plastic objects she photographs are salvaged from beaches around the world.

Soup: 500+ is made from more than 500 bits of plastic debris found in the digestive tract of a (dead) albatross chick in the North Pacific Gyre (aka the Great Garbage Patch).

Penalty, from the Penalty collection, is made up of 597 washed-up soccer balls. Finding so many flotsam toy soccer balls took the artist and 47 members of the public a whole four months. These ones were collected from 87 different beaches on four countries and seven islands around the United Kingdom.

_______________

Chris Jordan (born 1963) is an American artist and photographer based in Seattle, Washington. Many of Jordan's works are created from photographs of garbage and mass consumption.

On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2,000 miles from the nearest continent, global detritus ends up in the stomachs of thousands of baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast Pacific Ocean. Nothing was added or moved in these documentary photographs vy Chris Jordan, the pieces of plastic simply became visible as the birds decayed.

“For me, kneeling over their carcasses is like looking into a macabre mirror. These birds reflect back an appallingly emblematic result of the collective trance of our consumerism and runaway industrial growth. Like the albatross, we first-world humans find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic to our lives and our spirits.”