Library of Litter

Every being drops stuff.

Library of Litter draws together a notion of a library as a mutable body of always moving parts leaving and returning to place, as a process of gathering and regathering performed on matter and by matter itself, and comparing the activity of human littering with that of other beings; as consumption and regurgitating of matter that is fundamental to ecosystems and lifecycles. I think it has become perfectly clear to most people that this fundamental behaviour in humans has become damaging because of the type of materials we allow to enter into our environments. 

I spent quite a lot of time in 2019 and early 2020 wandering the streets of Coventry near the studio I was using during my residency for Coventry Artspace, thinking about the things I could see around me on the ground. The mixture of human and plant debris and how the human-made sprang out into visibility with its bright colours and sharp lines, so different to the browns, greens, and dusky oranges and red of plant matter.  Through 2020, during the lockdowns that kept us all physically apart and worried, I did the same but around my suburban home. Things on the ground weren't really all that different but that somnolent atmosphere lent itself to noticing small changes and I began to collect just-fallen twigs and tree blossoms, feeling that I'd never noticed them properly before. I hadn't appreciated the sticky sweetness of buds and delicate yellow of limp catkins. I took these home and scanned them on my desktop scanner. The images that the scanner generated when I used it without the lid made lines in the background behind the buds and twigs that made them look like they were sliding or falling down in space. They made me think of the importance of falling to continuance of life. How this strange period also left me feeling exhausted and limp, and yet was having this effect of making me see the world around me so that I felt I was actually living in the world, rather that the one I travelled to find, or I suppose I felt I had to go and live in that was probably more constructed as an idea - a culture - than this other actual culture of matter and beings that was actually all around and had been there all this time.

I think 2019/20 and 2020/21 are the two books in my Library of Litter that feel like they are completed. Because the pandemic had the effect of closing one book in March 2020, and then closing the one that followed when the last lockdown ended and I transitioned stutteringly back to whatever is now considered normality - although it still feels like a different normality to the one before. 2019 is the book that appeared in the exhibition, at Coventry Artspace Arcadia gallery, all about the things I found on pavements and parks and carparks in Coventry. This includes all the embossments I made of the litter I found. As well as Polygalls and Mother Oak which were inspired by the knopper oak galls and other lifecycles that form, live and die in spaces humans make but without any other intervention from us and of which we are totally oblivious. 2020/21 is about falling things. Since then, and for which I am very glad, there have been no sudden interruptions. But these can always happen, so I've kept the idea of Library of Litter open. Occasionally I go back and add more chapters to 2019/20 and 2020/21.

The best place to see images of 2019/20 Library of Litter exhibition is on my website.

Some of the images from 2020/21 appear in Cracks in the moon and aliens in the sand, also on my website.