work with what you got

Around my area, the Council Cleanup happens around twice a year. I believe other councils do it where different houses put out their rubbish and contact the council for it to be collected when it suits.

Where I live however, it’s done differently. The council cleanup is on a set date, and you must put out your rubbish over a two week period for it to be collected.

For two weeks my suburb is filled with throw out piles of random rubbish all across the streets.

During this two weeks it’s not rare to find yourself or others wandering the streets, flicking through the piles of mess to see what random things could be found in peoples trash.

Around the lockdown period in 2020 we were limited to only go outside for 30 minutes of physical activity per day. During the lockdown our council also had our two week council cleanup.

With restrictions on unnecessary travel, the idea was born to look closer to home for opportunities and spots to train. A new project emerged for me, to train and film a video, within these situational confinements of the situation I was in, using the obstacles that I could use at the time.

An idea I wanted to play with was the impermanence of the obstacles I would be using. Normally when I train, or when most people train, we look for good sturdy obstacles, and the more cemented down, non-wobble-able an obstacle is, the better.

But this Project grew to be the exact opposite of that, where I had to use the bent, warped and broken objects people had thrown out to create lines. What began as a means of training in limited circumstance, evolved into an exploration of creativity.

It was interesting to be able to not only uniquely interact with the obstacles in various ways, but also play use the idea that these objects were all being thrown out by whoever owned them, and therefore, were all rubbish anyway. This meant I could warp, bend, alter and/or destroy the environment I was playing in, due to its impermanent nature.

It was interesting to me that the lines and project created here was something that was situational in nature, and that although inspirations of this project could be taken by others in the future, it would be impossible to replicate the lines and movements exactly. The impermanent nature of the compositions and nature of specific obstacles meant that I was able to create a uniquely unreplicable project despite the challenging situational circumstances faced.