‘Utter Rubbish’ – Exhibition at Sheffield Institute of Arts explores our complex relationship with discarded materials – Open from 21 April 2018
Wednesday 30 April 2018 – Update
Joanne Lee was featured on BBC Radio Sheffield’s Paulette Edwards Show (presented on this occasion by Becky Measures) at 1100 on Friday 27 April 2018. Joanne spoke about the exhibition and about litter more broadly. Other topics for the panellists were litter picking, mental health, and Keeping Britain Tidy. Listen to the show here.
Utter Rubbish: Conversations about litter and waste is an exhibition by Sheffield Hallam University’s Frazer Hudson, Joanne Lee and Joanna Rucklidge; and a project about our complex relationship to discarded materials. It attends to the everyday instances of littering and fly-tipping that blight the city of Sheffield as elsewhere, and considers the resources wasted when we fail to recycle the rubbish our society so readily generates. Rather than reaching for easy judgement and too neat solutions, the project tries to linger with devalued stuff and to rethink the responses we can and do have to what has been thrown away.
The exhibition, held at the Sheffield Institute of Arts located in the Head Post Office, is due to open on Saturday 21 April, with a private viewing the evening before.
Utter Rubbish: Conversations about litter and waste
Sheffield Institute of Arts, Head Post Office S1 2AY
Exhibition open 21 April – 19 May 2018, Monday – Saturday 10AM – 4PM
Private view on 20 April 5.30PM – 8.30PM
Recurrently walking the city, we have gathered objects, images and films, and have developed from our findings a series of poetic, playful and critical works that seek to deepen and complicate our connections with what we try to get rid of. Art schools have long been a place for valuing things differently, for scavenging and re-purposing, and for developing alternative narratives about what is possible: as lecturers and researchers at Sheffield Institute of Arts we want to communicate the complexity of waste and generate conversations about its potential, through these works using rubbish both as material and metaphor.
Frazer Hudson is course leader for the BA Hons Illustration and Joanne Lee and Joanna Rucklidge are senior lecturers in Graphic Design at Sheffield Hallam University.