Artist Hunts Trash

Artist Hunts Trash

NEWS RELEASE
From Letting Space
Wellington Independent Arts Trust

Artist Eve Armstrong is asking the public to help with the building of a huge public sculpture, by contributing their clear plastic packaging to collection points now running in art galleries operating around the Wellington region.

The artwork ‘Taking Stock’, part of the Letting Space programme of temporary public art work in Wellington will be made from thousands of pieces of reused clear and milky-white plastic packaging. It will be on show during November in an empty central Wellington shop.

“To make this sculpture,” says Armstrong, “I am asking residents in the Wellington region to collect their clear plastics rather than throwing them in recycling or rubbish bins.”

Collection points are now open inside public galleries until 5 November at the New Dowse in Lower Hutt, Pataka Museum of Arts and Culture in Porirua, and Enjoy Gallery and Toi Pōneke Arts Centre in the central city. They will be joined by City Gallery Wellington on 25 September.

“Any clean, clear plastic packaging is good,” says Armstrong, “and if you have a moment to pull off the labels that’s even better. Please no shopping bags or milk bottles though.”
“Clear plastic could include packaging from electronic gadgets, tools and toys – that rigid stuff that’s really difficult to open! - containers, bottles, lids, packets, punnets, trays or boxes. You might also have milky-white or clear objects lying around home – old Tupperware, fridge drawers, vases, shelving, display stands, and brochure holders. We’re also very happy to get off-cuts of Perspex, and seconds or excess plastic from factories.”

An enormous sculpture comprised of the plastic wrapping that surrounds our daily lives, Eve Armstrong's Taking Stock will be a sublime retail display landscape made up of what is usually thrown away. The artwork “will address the visual techniques used to market and sustain our consumer culture but offer nothing to buy or sell, and no promises or dreams to invest in.”

Armstrong’s is one of four new projects recently announced as art of the Letting Space public art series run in vacant commercial sites in Wellington. Following on from the attention grabbing Free Store by Kim Paton in the city’s Ghuznee Street in May, which saw food distributed for free, curators Mark Amery and Sophie Jerram say the next round of artworks all revalue things which have been regarded as worthless. Letting Space is a public art programme that seeks to transform the relationship between artists, property developers and their city.

Further information on upcoming projects and other Letting Space events and information can be found at www.lettingspace.org.nz.

ABOUT EVE ARMSTRONG
Eve Armstrong is an established contemporary artist who was recently the recipient of an Arts Foundation New Generation Award. For more information on her practice please see http://www.evearmstrong.net/

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