Practice, Provocation, and Participation:Thinking with Waste

'Practice, Provocation, and Participation: Thinking with Waste' draws on art-based and ecological writings, artworks, and concepts to interrogate how art practice and research into waste issues can enable learning, artistic experience, environmental awareness, and sustainable practice. To explore waste problems and other ecological concerns, my research invokes animistic, newmaterialist, and eco-pedagogic views to help me build connections to and challenge habitual assumptions about waste issues. I experiment with bioplastics made from food scraps and peels to vivify waste, problematise ecological concerns, and procure less waste through my creative practice. My studio processes involve sorting, blending, drying, pouring, layering, and mapping the bioplastic by rekindling and reactivating biowaste as a material form with purpose and connections to the world. To expand material possibilities and embodied experiences with waste and bioplastics, participants are called to engage actively in my studio process. Through my call-and-response interaction with participants, I enable provocations, dialogue, reflections, responses and learning by the participants which subsequently inspire new works and ways of thinking about waste issues. Against this backdrop, my research straddles and juxtaposes artistic approaches and pedagogical methodologies as tools for generating new knowledge and meaning through call-and-response learning with waste. Centring my research within this larger body of art practice and pedagogy, the works derived from the research not only reveal new ways of understanding waste issues, but also exude optimism for revitalizing waste, breaking boundaries, healing the earth, and enabling fresh visions of our collective experience.