Waste Not, Want Not was a 'pop up' group exhibition, running for 3 days in April 2016 at Millfield Shopping Centre, Balbriggan. It was organized by Balbriggan Tidy Towns and opened by key opening speaker Duncan Steward. Participating were 8 artists, craft makers and 3 local schools.
This was the (mission) statement:
With this exhibition entitled Waste Not, Want Not we want to create a talking point about waste, pollution and the environment through the medium of visual art. The art showing at this exhibition does not want to be an end in itself, rather, we are hoping it will be a beginning, a starting point towards an awareness of what art can do to help work with and minimise waste.
Art can point the viewer in a certain direction and it can ask big questions. What we can do with our exhibition is ask the question: have you considered this, have you considered that you can actually make art out of rubbish, out of things people deem useless and will otherwise throw away. It won't solve the problem of pollution, but it will put a question to the viewer and sometimes the question can lead to something bigger. The job of art is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable, in our case we want to disturb the comfortable, the person who thinks everything is just fine and we don't have to change anything. Significant changes have to take place in light of a looming mountain of waste growing bigger every day.
The artistic movements of dada and surrealism envisioned western culture's flotsam as melting clocks on beaches, clothes irons covered in nails, bicycles wheels atop stools and teacups with fur linings. A viewer's experience with a trash/found art-piece need not purely be a visual delight to the eye. By choosing these unconventional materials to work with, the artists in this exhibition imagine that art might equally act as a spur for the viewer's mind. A viewer might develop their own ideas about what is beautiful and meaningful in any of the found or trash-placed things they themselves might encounter.
The objects in the exhibition range from a lizard made of copper wire, to paint-can lids encrusted with tints, to a taxidermy sea-gull with an inserted resin-cast made of found plastic shards. Materials used will include old newspapers turned into logs, old wire, found plastic, broken nick-knack, a neglected toy, an unused pile of furniture wheels and screws, recycled glass, collected cereal boxes and lots more.
In Waste Not Want Not the viewer might sense the joy of the artist giving a dispirited object a second life, caring for it, treating it with love, transforming it, making it new again, perhaps even feeling there is a soul in everything and therefor deserving of attention. If the artist feels this way about the object, then we could even say there is love involved in what is done here, love in the finding, reshaping and renewing, and what is done in love is well done.
This was the (mission) statement:
With this exhibition entitled Waste Not, Want Not we want to create a talking point about waste, pollution and the environment through the medium of visual art. The art showing at this exhibition does not want to be an end in itself, rather, we are hoping it will be a beginning, a starting point towards an awareness of what art can do to help work with and minimise waste.
Art can point the viewer in a certain direction and it can ask big questions. What we can do with our exhibition is ask the question: have you considered this, have you considered that you can actually make art out of rubbish, out of things people deem useless and will otherwise throw away. It won't solve the problem of pollution, but it will put a question to the viewer and sometimes the question can lead to something bigger. The job of art is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable, in our case we want to disturb the comfortable, the person who thinks everything is just fine and we don't have to change anything. Significant changes have to take place in light of a looming mountain of waste growing bigger every day.
The artistic movements of dada and surrealism envisioned western culture's flotsam as melting clocks on beaches, clothes irons covered in nails, bicycles wheels atop stools and teacups with fur linings. A viewer's experience with a trash/found art-piece need not purely be a visual delight to the eye. By choosing these unconventional materials to work with, the artists in this exhibition imagine that art might equally act as a spur for the viewer's mind. A viewer might develop their own ideas about what is beautiful and meaningful in any of the found or trash-placed things they themselves might encounter.
The objects in the exhibition range from a lizard made of copper wire, to paint-can lids encrusted with tints, to a taxidermy sea-gull with an inserted resin-cast made of found plastic shards. Materials used will include old newspapers turned into logs, old wire, found plastic, broken nick-knack, a neglected toy, an unused pile of furniture wheels and screws, recycled glass, collected cereal boxes and lots more.
In Waste Not Want Not the viewer might sense the joy of the artist giving a dispirited object a second life, caring for it, treating it with love, transforming it, making it new again, perhaps even feeling there is a soul in everything and therefor deserving of attention. If the artist feels this way about the object, then we could even say there is love involved in what is done here, love in the finding, reshaping and renewing, and what is done in love is well done.
Toxic Love Story, Thomas Brezing (and following images)
Dresses from the Junk Kouture project, Loreto Secondary School Balbriggan
Work by Cris Newmann