Many moons ago I posted i was trying to bring second life to rubbish.
This world has a culture of disposable wealth and disposable property, and with that we accumulate a large amount of waste. The development of a recycling culture has been a goal many environmental groups are quite a number of years, with very little success. My intention with this piece was to show that there is possible as statically pleasing view of recycling and reusing.
The intent was to produce an aesthetically pleasing creation while using recycled or reclaimed materials that would normally be used as waste and discarded, though as this project progressed and I began researching step-by-step this project began to hold the prospects of having meaning with far-reaching ramifications.
This project has the possibility of developing a public mindset for sustainability and recycling that is a difficult concept to inject into the people of the world today. Reusing and recycling is not seen as a visually pleasing concept.
The dress is the aesthetically pleasing catwalk advertising concept that shows that crisp packets have practical use for everyone and then the wearable tents is a life-saving practical product using the same material as in the dress.
This project grew from possible jewellery out of recycled materials into the psychological development and potential project of crisp packets and drinks cans from the catwalk to the mountainside.
Making products out of drinks cans and crisp packets does give those drinks cans and crisp packets are second life but one of my final pieces could possibly give a second life to a human being.
Each step of the way through this project I have researched, investigated, researched, developed, and researched again. I have taken into consideration not only the psychological premise of the viewer of my pieces but also the psychological premise of a consumer in the world around us. I’ve taken this project from the classroom/ college brief but has our potential to take this onto a wider environmental/community project.
I needed to reach out to the community to get hundreds of crisp packets for this project it meant that people other than college personnel and students knew about my project. This encouraged small families to collect the crisp packets and placing them in a carrier bag for their postman to collect at the end of the week, they were then visually seeing the rubbish that they would normally have just placed in the bin.
Even without taking my project further and creating these wearable tents and couture dresses on a regular basis my project has already had the psychological impact on a little town in West Lothian. What if my couture dress walks down a catwalk or a red-carpet one by famous face one day and then connected to a piece of survival gear that saves the life the next this to will create psychological and environmental impact on the wider world.
This did not even occur to me at the beginning of this project and has only grown inside my own mind as I gone step-by-step, with research after research. And it was my intention to discover this subject of second life. If we are going to make reuse and recycle more than just a buzzword and an actual environmental movement then we need to work on the psychological first, sociological second, and then the planet will not come third in the race.