Insight 13: When Waste Stops Looking Like Waste

When I put the ground 3D-printing waste into the glass bowl, it no longer read as the familiar debris I had been collecting. It was a moonscape, beautiful and completely different, and it changed the whole mood inside the bowl. I had planned to grind the waste … I had not planned for it to become visually exciting for me!

I had deliberately kept my failed prints, supports and leftover fragments because experimenting with them was always going to come once I moved beyond the pressure of producing enough work for the first Fragile Futures exhibitions. I had bought a blender a few months earlier because this experimentation was already part of the plan. However, once I saw those ground fragments in the bowl, I was surprised by how much had shifted through that one physical change. They were still the residue of 3D printing, but they were no longer sitting there merely announcing where they had come from.

They were creating atmosphere, and I suddenly had a glimpse of how much more I might be able to ask of them.

Not long afterwards, during my RMIT interview, one of the lecturers looked at a photograph of my discarded 3D-printer installation, The Waste Engine, and said, “Oh yes, that’s just waste being waste.” The phrase struck a chord with me because I had just seen what grinding could do. I explained what I had done with the ground fragments, and he asked how I felt about the result.

My answer was immediate: I was excited! It was beautiful!

That exchange stayed with me because he had not given me an answer or told me what to do next. He had simply named something at exactly the right moment. My material experiment had already happened, but his comment snapped the distinction into focus and opened a much larger question around it. It was an excellent example of a supervisor opening enquiry.

The change in legibility had not weakened my response to the material; it had intensified it.

Looking back across the practice, I could suddenly see that I had been changing the arrangement or context of the waste without substantially altering the material itself. I had embedded it in resin, glued it onto surfaces, accumulated it and piled it around other objects, but the discarded pieces generally remained recognisable. That was often precisely what the work required. The Waste Engine has a quite specific purpose: the broken printer and the residue gathered around it make the production system visible, so the viewer needs to understand what those fragments are. Other works also rely on that recognition because the material is operating as evidence. I am not rejecting that approach; I was now ready to explore the other options available to me.

Pic above: The Waste Engine, waste being waste.

Grinding made the source less obvious while its visual and atmospheric effect became stronger, and that is where the experimentation becomes interesting. At some point the fragments may move so far from their original form that a viewer no longer knows what they are looking at. In one work, that may create curiosity or allow another association to emerge; in another, it may conceal the very thing the viewer needs to recognise.

As I think this through now, I can see a related question in one of the artworks I examined during my diagnostics. A pile of rubbish remained completely legible as rubbish, but the shadow projected from it became the image of the couple who created the rubbish. Nothing about the pile itself had changed. The shift occurred through light and shadow, allowing the same arrangement to be read in two entirely different ways. I did not connect that work to my own experiment at the time, but I can see the relationship now. In that case, the transformation occurred in the projected image; in the Microplastics bowl, it came from physically changing the discarded fragments.

Grinding was my first altered-material experiment. More recently, I glued 3D-printing residue differently onto one of the Taxonomies of Absence, and the surface changed immediately. The pieces remained visible, but they no longer behaved in quite the same way. That small change has already sent my mind in several directions because there is so much more I could test through scale, attachment, layering, density, containment and whatever else appears once I start properly playing with it.

I do not want to pinpoint an outcome because there is no outcome yet. I have no audience response to the Microplastics work and no exhibition evidence for what changed legibility might create in the encounter. What I have is the excitement of discovering that this material has far more possibilities than I had yet allowed it, along with a question I now want to push through the making: how far can I transform it before something important is gained, lost or changed into something I had not thought to look for?