Hidden Gems of the Mundane
More than ever are we becoming accustomed to seeing waste. Like a soldier in camouflage or a chameleon during times of distress, it blends in with its surroundings.
This is an ongoing project about everyday objects, and how people consume, accumulate and reject them. How do items move from in-use to rubbish, from recycled to re-used? Using my camera to break down the city’s surface, I enter a world inside the world that we see, like a parallel universe where one man’s trash becomes another man’s treasure (quite literally).
These ordinary items I find on the street have all sat undisturbed, waiting to be collected or photographed. There is a sense of history to the objects in that they evoke memories and associations through visible evidence: signs of love, abuse and neglect. You can see the state of these objects and debris as demonstrative of our consumption patterns and the continually transforming relationship between humans and their environment.
The innumerable lives and dwellings of life in the city makes time shift and bend in unpredictable ways. Everything within the cityscape seems to be connected, nothing possesses a single or exclusive life.
I ponder and speculate about the stories behind my encounters. Who did this item belong to? I try to put a face and name to something inanimate as the search for a thing and the search for a person seems inseparable. How did it end up here and what might happen to it after I have taken a picture? I can’t preserve these objects, but I can capture them — and the effects of time in a sense — before they disappear, which can happen at any moment.
The simple paradox of photographing something that is typically considered ugly, useless, unappealing and dirty, makes me think and look afresh.
The will to catalogue has proliferated in a literal sense with inventories of all kinds of random found items, as if preparing documents for a book that describes every little aspect and fragment of the world. And yet in these accumulations of things, I am not assembling anything that amounts to proof. Rather, archiving and collecting is a kind of compulsive activity that I cannot suppress.
