The Liverpool Art Prize 2012 winner will use recycled waste products to create a new art installation.
Robyn Woolston will turn nine large bales of discarded plastic into a large art structure in the Walker Art Gallery to explore the burden of inorganic waste and highlight our relationship with the earth’s finite resources.
Alongside the bales there will be many parts to the installation, including the 1898 painting Strangers in a Strange Land by Albert Starling, which lends it’s name to the artist’s work.
Also featured will be Woolstons’ book, Waste. Product. Istanbul, which is a documentation of the waste processes the artist observed whilst living in Turkey.
Woolston said: “Waste materials are abundantly available because of the way in which we consume. Strangers in a Strange Land offers a way to reassess the value of these materials so as to understand just how much we value their inherent possibilities.”
She worked in partnership with Liverpool-based Centriforce Products, the UK’s largest independent plastic recycling company which turns waste polythene products, such as plastic milk bottles and shrink wrap, into the plastic equivalent of timber, which can be used to make park benches and cables. The company supplied the bales of polythene that make up the installation.
Ronnie Doctor, marketing manager of Centriforce, told JMU Journalism: “Robyn chose us to work with. She was looking for a Liverpool connection to environmental issues. She is trying to make the contrast between our materials, which are not very pretty, and the Walker Art Gallery.”