Souvenirs of Consumerism presents an investigation into the materiality and ontology of discarded plastic consumer waste through a new materialist reimagining of found discarded objects. The work examines the social and ecological impacts of waste by gleaning, photographing, archiving, curating, and installation of the waste itself in the gallery space. Challenging the delineations made between ‘life’ and ‘matter’, ‘animate things’ and ‘passive objects’ the studio practice attempts to contend with systems of consumption, object devaluation and ecological pollution.
The studio research is supported by a theoretical examination of the ‘aesthetic abject’, object-oriented ontology, vibrant materialism, and the multidisciplinary field of Discard Studies. The project considers fields of historical and contemporary photography, museology, and curatorial practices, and examines the work of contemporary visual artists addressing environmental pollution and waste through the presentation of found objects in collections, archives, or multimedia installations.
By defining the destiny of discarded waste through a range of artistic transformations, the work brings visual attention to the abject reality of our nature/culture disconnection. This project works to challenge systems of object (de)valuation, consumer behaviour and capitalist ideology, while working to revalue the offerings of environmental art within the consumer-centric art world itself. This work offers us a new way to see ourselves through the objects we have tried (and failed) to throw away.
HARD/SOFT, 2025
This work began with a collection of over 1,000 pieces of plastic trash I have gleaned from the beaches near where I live on Gadigal land. As part of my everyday art practice, I photograph each piece of trash to create a digital and physical archive of plastic pollution, creating a story of transformation and re-imagination for the waste objects we consume and then leave behind.
Hard/Soft takes this a step further, leaning on the digitally transformative technology of artificial intelligence. I have always been drawn to the synthetic materiality of my trash objects, and so I have used tools like ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Midjourney to create synthetic realities of what these waste objects are replacing in our oceans - creating a nature/collapse we can’t even see.
My work has been driven by a desire to understand what pollution is, and I keep coming back to the work of academic Michel Serres, who, in his book, Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution, looks at both what he calls "hard pollution"—the poisoning of the Earth—and the disastrous impact of the "soft pollution" created by sound and images on our psyches.
In addition to collecting hard plastic waste, I’ve started collecting soft synthetic AI-generated images for this archive to further each object’s ontological transformation. These AI images feel like fitting plastic manifestations of our material/digital (hard/soft) consumption. We can now create synthetic reimaginings of our collective unconscious, but at what cost?
Like our polluted oceans, I think about our minds. The depth we can’t reach or see. There is both hard plastic pollution on our earth and soft plastic pollution in our brains. There is also hard plastic pollution in our brains and soft plastic pollution on our earth. And so I present a collection of plastic waste and synthetic reimaginings, entangled in a web of hard/soft collective contradictions and provocations.
The New Drifters, 2024
Phytoplankton are too small to be seen with the unaided eye. Our ocular capacity blinds us to their essential role in the carbon cycle and global photosynthetic activity. This blindness mirrors our collective ways of unseeing the trash we pollute into our oceans and our inability to hold in our minds the object permanence of what we discard.
This photograph lets us see the new plastic drifters; the detritus in our oceans crowding the vibrant marine plankton. Each individual piece is a gleaned waste object I have found by the coast, captured and inverted to resemble the disrupted underwater world of sea plankton. Now you can see them.
The Reflection Series, 2024
Mirror chrome paint on gleaned plastic trash: an intervention for discarded consumer waste dressed up in a silvery imitation of material value. This series redefines the destiny of each piece of plastic pollution I have gleaned from our local beaches. Now, they exist as reflective symbols of material culture.
Reflective surfaces upon which to examine whether the objects in our lives merely imitate what is truly valuable. So, in the objects we throw away can we ask: what really matters to us?
Girlhood and What Remains, 2024
A photographic collection of gleaned trash objects once used to satisfy our cultural dream of girlhood.
Objects of craft, connection, and colour, once sold as aspirational items of a constructed identity, are now washed up on the shore.
At first, we marvel at the objects’ sparkle, hue, shape, and cuteness. But when new social demands are imposed on women-as-consumers, these former objects of desire are discarded and littered in our environment as symbols of our collective unconscious in the form of waste.
A Taxonomy of How We Eat Fish, 2024
We overfish and flavour our food. We bottle the flavour, the ferment, the paste, in single-use plastic bottles with fish eyes and fish faces. We marvel at the fish bottle. Their sense of whimsy. The Japanese entomologist Yoshisha Sawada has identified 76 kinds of soy sauce fish containers. 6 Families. 21 Geni.
This is my collection of plastic soy fish bottles I have gleaned from the shores of Sydney, taxonomised in order from full and unused, through to used and degraded by the environment, then empty and discarded.
The plastic fish, now labelled with the names of endangered species of fish; reimagine our finite natural resources. We eat, displace, and poison. We name, taxonomies, and sort in systems, as an attempt of dominion over the world around us. Then we fill the void we have created with plastic imitations, and they are so cute.
To Score, 2023 — Digital Photograph printed on Ilford Fibre Gloss paper. 86x126 cm framed.
To Harbour, 2023 — Digital Photograph printed on Ilford Fibre Gloss paper. 86x126 cm framed.
To Greenwash, 2023 — Digital Photograph printed on Ilford Fibre Gloss paper. 86x126 cm framed.
To Doll-Up, 2023 — Digital Photograph printed on Ilford Fibre Gloss paper. 86x126 cm framed.
To Inflate, 2023 — Digital Photograph printed on Ilford Fibre Gloss paper. 86x126 cm framed.
To Outlive, 2023 — Digital Photograph printed on Ilford Fibre Gloss paper. 86x126 cm framed.
