“No doubt your civilization has some very interesting features: but if you bring it here we’ll loose our meadows, our trees, our rivers and we’ll be worse off. Would you mind not discovering us?” So said the chief gnome in Umberto Eco’s The Gnomes of Gnú, a children’s book beautifully illustrated by Eugenio Carmi. Author [...]
Archive of posts tagged garbage
Recycled Jewellery – Tonya O’Hara and Jeremy Mays
Art works made from recycled materials are all the rage. Most of them don’t seem to work particularly well. Two British designers have, however, produced attractive objects made from recycled materials. Tonya O’Hara produces rings (above) and earrings (below) made from recycled plastic bottles. Jeremy Mays’s work is even more ingenious. He makes beautiful jewellery [...]
Trash – Again: The Art Of Huang Xu
It’s hard to imagine that the diaphanous forms created and photographed above are discarded plastic bags. Huang Xu, a Beijing born artist, collects plastic bags from the endless rubbish heaps now to be found in China and, using 3D scanners normally used by archeologists, digitally re-models them to create these wonderful images. Plastic bags are [...]
Garbage and Landscape Beauty – the work of Yao Lu
Yao Lu is a digital artist who creates beautiful landscape images in the style of traditional Chinese paintings – beautiful mountain and water scenes are shrouded in could and mist, eliciting serene and romantic feelings. But a closer look at these images reveals that all is not as it seems. The images are digital composites [...]
Clever or Effective? The Work of Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan’s art examines the massiveness of our consumption and its effects. In his artist’s statement he says “The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for [...]
Beauty or Garbage?
Edward Burtynsky knows what to do with a dump. He brings it to us photographed with architectural symmetry and precision. He creates a formal beauty out of garbage. Burtynsky has made it his life’s work to create images of the imprint that Man leaves on the world. Be it the wounds on the earth created [...]
