Wasteland & the true cost of Convenience. E8: Louise McCurdy
‘Purveyors of Found and Vintage Plastic Goods’
The sign on the shopfront of the True Cost of Con-Venience store in the Forest of Dean. An awesome play of words and perceptions by Dirty Beach collaborators Louise McCurdy and Chloe Hanks. Louise is a fellow Oceans 8 Brighton consultant and has been creating informative environmental art from waste plastic since 2006. Her recent work Wasteland and Planet Care are the result of a new collaboration with photographer Alex Bamford.
Dirty Beach
As one half of “Dirty Beach” with Chloe Hanks, they created immersive, fully fitted supermarket installations that mimicked the visual language of large modern retailers but stocked only plastic waste recovered from the environment. Dirty Beach built nine installations in the U.K., Netherlands and Belgium including the Trucost of Con-Venience ‘Purveyors of Found and Vintage Plastics’.
Wasteland
Lou is now working with photographer Alex Bamford and can often been found in the environment with piles of plastic and every day items like a shopping trolley, washing machines and hoovers. Wasteland is the result of this project and more information can be found on their websites in the links below.
Lou writes “My art delves deep into the damaging mind boggling environmental consequences of the plastic pandemic. We have created a series of striking photographs of a rusty shopping trolley found buried on Brighton beach, filled with plastic waste. The trolley and I have been photographed on beaches, hills, rivers and forests.
It’s a powerful engaging visual comment on waste plastic highlighting the harmful effects on the environment, society’s rampant consumerism and our addiction to plastic. Plastic lasts forever: it’s not inert, it leaches into our food, drinking water, the soil, it’s in the air we breathe and it is in us.”
I love the humour and fun that Lou brings into her work. I wish there were more people using humour in their environmental messaging as I believe it really does have an impact.
Planet Care
In this episode I talk to Louise about the shell of a washing machine that she has in her front room. Since recording it, Alex Bamford and her have launched their Planet Care collection.
“Following on from our Wasteland project, Alex Bamford and I were asked to create visuals for PlanetCare, who’s filters capture the thousands of microfibres that leach from your laundry every time you use your washing machine.”
Louise and Alex were also part of our Big Pride Beach Clean and were there with me at 5.30am and with their hoover!
Alex helped to document to huge amount of wate collected by Oceans 8 Brighton and the volunteers. Louise then made this blanket of all the balloons we found!
Sorry about the sound quality on this episode, it was one of my earlier recordings before I worked out how to get the levels right! Or perhaps we were recording it from the depths of Wasteland! I know you will love hearing about Louise’s journey, the other super interesting and amusing items she has found and how she has used her fun sense of humour to get environmental messages out there.
You can find more about Louise here:
Podcast edited by the wonderful Chloe Aust
Next episode in 2 weeks. Please do comment and review (ideally in itunes) as it helps to spread the word of positive change.
Thank you!
