Honouring the Overlooked: The Art of Recycling

This article is powered by Product Care Recycling, sponsoring Science World’s eco-storytelling competition BC Green Games and empowering us to tell stories at the intersection of art and the environment.

David Weir loves garbage. Bits of plastic and wire scattered in back alleys, stacks of tile samples from building projects, or another-man’s-treasures cluttering thrift store shelves—it’s art waiting to happen.

“I go to [the thrift store] every Monday morning,” says Weir. “Sometimes I have a mission. Sometimes I just wander, and without really filtering, pick things up and put them in the basket.”

Ten years ago, Weir retired from his career as an architect. He’s always considered himself a visual artist, first and foremost. (“Architecture was a detour for me,” he says. “Not art.”) But it was in his role as an architect that he really encountered waste objects en masse. New projects meant reviewing samples of new building materials.

“I frequently had huge stacks of floor tile, insulation, wood stain in various colours, piled up on my desk,” Weir says. “I just liked them. I couldn’t stop arranging them and stacking them and playing with them. I just liked them.”

Recycled materials have a long history in visual arts: In 1913, Marcel Duchamp turned an old bicycle wheel and a stool into the first kinetic sculpture. Now, recent generations of artists are using garbage on a large scale to deliver explicitly ecological messages. For instance, Hiroshi Fuji’s sculptures made from misfit toys, Von Wong’s polymer tide, Khalil Chishtee’s plastic bag sculptures all fit into the zeitgeist of upcycled art. And non-profit organizations like Art of Recycle are encouraging amateur artists to make use of materials already at hand.

Locally, not-for-profit organization Product Care Recycling offers free leftover paint to the public through its PaintShare program, which  has been used by the likes of the Vancouver Mural Festival and local artist Jan de Beers.

Look at some of Weir’s older works, and you see a strong use of recycling on display. One piece consists of hundreds of two inch by two inch vinyl floor tiles, stacked horizontally to form   multicoloured strips, like DNA code. In another, 500 electrical outlets, arranged in a wide swath, give up their status as discrete objects and become something more like a substance.

At the time, if these samples weren’t repurposed as art, they would have ended up in the landfill. In fact, waste from construction and demolition makes up more than 40% of total materials thrown away in Vancouver according to the City’s 2018 Green Demolition By-law Update. For context, almost 718,000 tonnes of waste landed in the Vancouver Landfill in 2018.

Thankfully, efforts like the Green Demolition By-law and Product Care’s paint recycling program, which provides more than 200 recycling locations across B.C to help divert paint from landfills and waterways, are beginning to lower the amount of material being thrown in the dump.

And artists like Weir—who never set out to deliver an explicitly environmental message with his work but—makes use of bottle caps, clumped together to form a bubbly froth; chunks of household plastic containers, mounted on metal rods like archaeological fragments; and flattened pop cans to fill frames like butterfly specimens.

“Art’s not going to solve the climate crisis,” he says, adding that the key to our survival is largely in the hands of scientists and activists. But art makers—”dreamers,” in Weir’s words—have a role to play as well.

Weir’s motto, in his own words: “Honouring the overlooked.” He sets walking routes through Vancouver back alleys, his favourite places to hunt for materials. Weir follows the same instincts children do: To pick up items off the ground—a worn rubber gasket, a broken zip tie, a twig—and read a bigger story into them.

A series of Weir’s pieces do that literally. His framed alphabets, made of discarded bits and pieces scrounged from sidewalks and alleyways, transform garbage into glyphs.

“When I showed the alphabet pieces a few years ago,” Weir says, “I had great conversations … with people who wanted to identify the origin of all my little pieces of trash.”

“I’m not a philosopher,” says Weir. “But: We are the environment, and the environment is us.”

One of Weir’s upcoming pieces uses recycled chrome decals to remap the USA according to the names of vintage automobiles. It’s easy to read criticism of car culture into the work, but Weir says he doesn’t like to attach a specifically environmental message. His goal, he says, is to “open new windows”—new perspectives for viewers.

“No single pursuit is going to solve the climate crisis,” says Weir. “It’s going to take all of us working together to understand each other's points of view. And it’s the dreamers who are going to make that happen.”

---

Do you have an art or DIY project in mind and want to make a positive impact on the environment by repurposing?

Product Care’s PaintShare program might be the answer! You can pick up free leftover paint from many of Product Care’s recycling locations. You can also recycle your unwanted paint at these locations.