Artwork highlights recycling issues

Entitled From Cowboys to Astronauts, the exhibition highlights issues  such as recycling and 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 thrown away.

The title is inspired by Kenneth Boulding’s essay, ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.’ He envisioned a move away from a “cowboy economy”, based on the assumption of apparently boundless resources to a “spaceman economy”. The work includes a number of powerful messages highlighting the issues and the changes that need to be made by industry and society. It features work that makes use of a wide range of media from film, 3D work and photography.

 Three awards were given out to artists at the launch, including:

•  Artistic Effect and Use of Materials – Angela Read for her work, ‘Column’. A truly striking sculpture of recycled aluminium cans cut and manipulated into a beautiful 3D structure.  The drinks cans are packaging designed to seduce.  The can’s eventual state of dejection, its albeit brief history as receptacle and the variety of surface graphics articulate ideas of decay, renewal, consumption, repetition and change.
• Effective Portrayal of Message – Yvonne Morton for her work ‘Immortal’. This uses old bike parts and fabric to create a fantastic piece highlighting the lifecycle of the Medusa jellyfish, Territopsis Dohrnii, which is able to revert from sexual maturity to its immature polyp state. From this a new polyp colony develops making it biologically and genetically immortal. The piece highlights how we should learn from those species that respond to threat by regeneration and our resources should have a continuous lifecycle.
• Industrial Commission – In addition, Devon Contract Waste has commissioned Hilary O’Dwyer to produce a piece for their premises having seen the intricate and eye catching work she put into creating her piece, ‘For Their Future.’ Here, she painstakingly stripped old computer cables to recover the copper and made a bodice of a child’s dress. The fragile dress represents future generations, who will face difficulties unimaginable to us if we do not act now to protect our planet.

The exhibition has been made possible through funding support from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the space provided by Devon Contract Waste, and through the collaborative efforts of the artists, the CALMARE team and Devon Contract Waste.

Paul McCutchion, the Commercial Manager of CALMARE, which provides advice, technical expertise and support to companies in the South West, said: “The standard of work and effort put in by all to bring this exhibition together is fantastic and everyone involved hopes to build on this collaboration. Bringing together academia, industry and the creative industries in this way offers a unique opportunity to get the message out to a wider audience about the issues we all face and what needs to be done. It is a great complement to the series of industry workshops we are running in parallel about the Circular Economy, called the Circular Business Advantage, which is open to companies in the South West.”

The exhibition, which is free to the public, is open from Monday to Saturday until Friday, May 22nd 2015 and there will be special events held on Saturdays throughout, including a meet the artists session on Saturday 16 May.

For more details, please visit http://bit.ly/1zkYZBG