Artist Sarah Bingle with some of the works in the Plastic Pollution Solutions: Your Choice, Your Voice exhibition. Photo / Judith Lacy
Artist Sarah Bingle with some of the works in the Plastic Pollution Solutions: Your Choice, Your Voice exhibition. Photo / Judith Lacy
It no longer smells and the mud has gone, but there are still no dainty daisies or regal royals.
Instead, lazy people’s trash has been used by artists to provoke people into thinking about their consumption of plastic.
And the creative minds behind the exhibition Plastic Pollution Solutions: Your Choice, Your Voice have already received comments that rubbish does not belong in an art gallery. That’s what they wanted.
The main part of the exhibition is the installation Junkstaposition, made from items retrieved from Palmerston North streams.
There is a deliberate conflict between being in a beautiful gallery versus the reality of our consumer waste, curator Friederike Lugt says.
The installation demonstrates the juxtaposition of our aspirations as consumers versus the reality of our actions.
Lugt is the waste minimisation project lead at Environment Network Manawatū.
Part of the exhibition is the waste hierarchy. At the top is the best option of rethink/redesign. Then comes reduce, reuse/repurpose, recycle/compost, recover, to the least favoured option of treat and dispose.
Lugt says people are at different points on the hierarchy but she wants everyone to move up the pyramid.
So many people focus on recycling but we cannot recycle our way out of plastic waste, Lugt says.
Plastic is on a downward spiral as it cannot be recycled into a product of the same quality.
Bed ends, a washing machine, computer desk, paint, umbrella, jug, steam cleaner and couch are just some of the items pulled from streams.
Lugt encourages people to band together and say to producers “we don’t want your plastic”. Excessive packaging is not better for people’s health or the environment.
This washing machine was retrieved from a Palmerston North stream. Photo / Judith Lacy
Environment Network Manawatū's Plastic Pollution Challenge has been on a five-year mission to clean up local streams, raise awareness about the issue of plastic pollution and change public perceptions.
More than 1200 volunteers have salvaged more than 2000 rubbish bags of litter plus hundreds of large items from urban waterways.
As well as showing the extent of the work of the Plastic Pollution Challenge, the exhibition aims to prompt all of us to think about our daily choices and consider the downstream consequences of our actions.
While the art is important, Lugt also wants a big shout-out to everyone who has been cleaning the streams for so long.
Working with Lugt were artists Sarah Bingle and Jacob Gay.
Bingle says her painting has messages of colonialism, the chaos of our lives, and indigenous people’s relationship with the land.
It is a mediation on our relationship with the Earth offered in the spirit of pronia. The opposite of paranoia, it is a mental state in which you feel the world is conspiring to help you.
Artist Sarah Bingle talks about her mediation on our relationship with the Earth. Photo / Judith Lacy
Throughout the exhibition, there will be pop-in workshops on Saturdays from 10am–2pm. People can contribute to the collective conversation around plastic.
Lugt hopes to end up with a collective set of comments and ideas on dealing with plastic pollution.
