City artists create art from waste

Picture yourself on a spaceship, hundreds of miles above the Earth. Your journey into the cosmos will last some time - but, you only have a limited number of resources on board for yourself and your fellow space travellers, which, given their scarcity, you need to manage wisely.

As far back as 1966, economist Kenneth E. Boulding envisioned the need for a movement away from what he termed a "cowboy economy“, based on the assumption of apparently boundless resources, to a "spaceman economy". In his essay “The Coming of a Spaceship Earth,” he made the analogy that "the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system".

This idea that we are rapidly using up limited resources such as fossil fuels, some of which have taken billions of years to form - and creating serious waste problems along the way, still holds true 40 years later. However, concern about the issue is growing, and this is reflected in the growing trend of creating art out of waste materials, that has taken off in the past few years, and been featured in exhibitions across the country.

Now the trend is coming to Exeter, with a month long exhibition, From Cowboys to Astronauts, which promotes the concept of a circular economy – a regenerative economic system where materials and energy from products are recovered and put back into the system instead of simply being disposed of. Invited artists will use waste materials to demonstrate what can be achieved when we move away from the throwaway mind-set that is endemic in our society.

Participating artists attended an art from waste workshop hosted by the Centre for Alternative Materials and Remanufacturing Technologies (CALMARE), a business technology centre, part funded by the ERDF, based at the University of Exeter. The waste materials used in the exhibition have been sourced from the University itself and from other locations around Devon, including Exeter and Plymouth Scrapstores, Peninsula Waste Savers in Okehampton and the Devon County Council recycling centres managed by SITA.

Exeter artist Caroline Saunders is constructing a wheel sculpture using old chairs, brooms, tables and other such objects. She said: “After the workshop at CALMARE, what stuck in my mind was the idea of making things in component parts that can easily be taken apart and reused. The other image that I came away with was inspired by the exhibition title: circles, cowboy wagons and astronaut spaceships. I only used what I found, making dowels from an old wine rack, for instance, and found bolts to join pieces together. To emphasise that wood needs to be recycled, the wheel of objects is turning through a wood of floating, rootless paper trees.”

In recent years as resource prices have risen and waste problems increased, there has been greater interest in developing a "Circular Economy" – and the opportunity has been widely promoted by the Dame Ellen MacArthur Foundation founded in 2010 by the former professional yachtswoman.

On Saturday 2nd May, there will be a Family Day, where you will get the chance to use recycled materials yourselves, in children’s workshops run by artists taking part in the exhibition.

Meet the Artist days on Saturday 9th and 16th May will give the public an opportunity to talk to some of the artist exhibiting and find out more about their work.

Entry to the exhibition will be free, and it will be open to the public from Monday to Saturday, excluding bank holidays, until the final Friday, May 22nd 2015. For more details, visit http://bit.ly/1zkYZBG