Over the summer I became more focused in my interest in sustainable art practices and began to experiment with the material of food waste within my work. I had noticed that durin g the pandemic I had limited materials at my disposal. I also recognised that I did not want to buy materials to create art that might to go to waste, creating more rubbish and more plastic that would eventually end up in landfill or in our oceans. I began to experiment and explore my own environment for natural material alternatives.
While doing research I had come across the artist Gayle Chong Kwan, a London
artist that creates sculptures of landscapes, cityscapes and buildings made from food. Her work has a real engaging quality and the food transcends its own limitations and becomes something else entirely in the sculptures and photographs. Her work is largely inspiring to me because of the fact she uses sustainable materials being largely wasted or leftover Food. Another aspect I love about her pieces are the fragility and temporality of them, the food will eventually break down, mould and lose its organic form and become something else entirely which is a really interesting cycle.
A couple months after exploring her work I was cooking lunch noticed the amount of left over foods (onion peels, stalks, lemon rinds etc) that had really interesting shapes, forms and colours. So I began photographing the food in an attempt to capture the abstracted shapes, structure and forms that I was only now seeing within the food waste that I usually wouldn’t look twice at before throwing away. The idea of redemption and recognition of an object that is usually ignored and wasted and giving it purpose and a platform by capturing its unique qualities was a really interesting concept to me. I became fascinated in capturing the innate and intricate nature of the food and so began my journey in working with food waste.
