We all have our personal obsessions and, while some of us may like collecting pictures of the most beautiful and blissfully poetic places on Earth, for the last three years Harley Weir has been rather busy archiving a unique collection of photographs of...trash.
Weir's personal fixation was generated by a very simple act – throwing her own rubbish and suddenly thinking about what she was putting in the bin. This led to paying more attention to her own habits, but also to what was left around in the streets, such as unrecyclable plastic items and assorted everyday objects.
Weir started therefore walking around and travelling to take pictures of the detritus and debris we collectively scatter all over the world every year. She also opened an Instagram account - @rubbish_1, replaced after it was hacked by @rubbish_1.2 - that indirectly ended up chronicling not just Weir's obsession, but the patterns of consumption of the people living in the various places she visited.
The photographer found the sublime and the harrowing in the trash - from rotting flowers in shiny wrapping to bottles filled with yellowing piss.
Plastic bags and other plastic debris prevailed, though, over the other rubbish, prompting Weir to ponder about her own personal habits. As the months and then the years passed, the ongoing series turned indeed for the artist into a way to acknowledge her own footprint, while making sure people became more aware of plastic waste through her images.
Harley Weir recently brought together her compelling vision of trash in an exhibition entitled "rubbish_1" (until July 1) currently on at the Soft Opening Gallery, located inside London's Piccadilly Circus Underground. Her images are exhibited here with fragments of poems by multidisciplinary artist Wilson Oryema.
Oryema tries to address through his poems such as the ones from his self-published booklet "Wait", our problematic relationship with consumption, pushing us to think about our daily behaviours, and focusing on wasting food, clothing, but also other people, as highlighted in the poem "Consuming Relationships".
Once you read Oryema's words ("Do you savour every aspect or eat hurriedly to start sooner on the next one?"), you start seeing the trash photographed by Weir as people as well: the plastic bags become the partners we have discarded, the friends we have rejected, the family members we have alienated or the people we don't even know but we simply started hating for prejudices ingrained in our minds.
The final point of the Oryema's poems is to convince us to change our attitude towards other human beings, to transform also our plastic consuming habits and finally start leading a less wasteful life.
Weir and Oryema hope the event will raise awareness and take the conversation forward. To this aim, Weir's images are available to buy at the gallery with 50% of proceeds going towards ocean charities.
But Weir is not the only one who has thought about the oceans: Goga Ashkenazi, the current owner and creative director of Vionnet, recently collaborated with artist Marc Quinn on a capsule collection.
The latter moves from Quinn's "Raft Paintings" series that includes works made from non-biodegradable plastic waste bags and non-biodegradable polystyrene on canvas. Like Weir's images, Quinn's artworks try to turn something horrible like non-biodegradable plastic into something that helps raising awareness.
Vionnet's "Sustainable Surf" capsule collection includes 340-piece, among them coats, dresses, shirts, hoodies and trousers in eco-leather, cotton and terrycloth, plus accessories such as bags, belts and eyewear. The good news about the sunglasses is that they are made from recycled plastic in collaboration with Sea2See.
Fifty percent of sales will also be donated to the environmental initiative Parley For The Oceans, an organization that helps to fight pollution and tackle the threat to oceans, while £10 from each pair of "Sustainable Surf" sunglasses will go to Ambiente Europeo, an organisation promoting awareness around waste-free seas in the Mediterranean area.
The biggest challenge for us all remains generating zero waste (extremely difficult, but not impossible, especially if we all tried) and, while organising art exhibitions and launching capsule collections to raise awareness is all good, one way to take things further could be producing fewer clothes and accessories and reducing the numbers of runway shows (think about the Resort collections turning into a happy moveable feast with clients and influencers being flown by fashion companies from one place to another...). So if Ashkenazi at Vionnet wanted to save the oceans, why didn't she come up with a more compact capsule of 10-15 pieces instead of producing 340 items? The dilemma remains.
In the meantime, you should start thinking about how you can reduce your personal consumption and pollution, and you can do so if you're in London by stopping at Soft Opening and getting inspired by Weir and Oryema's work.
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