After spending months collecting rubble from torn-up, broken-down and torn-down areas of the city (see Rebuilding the City or Thought Rubble), I’ve started to collect other materials usually termed as waste. These are materials which could be broken down and used for another purpose such as coffee grinds, egg shells, bones, junk mail and dust. They are part of the peripheral benign waste in our lives. It becomes part of the chaotic waste that we choose not to order, it just all gets lumped together.

Peripheral thoughts are they same - they don’t seem to be of use. But they remain in our heads, while we try to filter through and pull meaning out of the mass.

The Rebuilding the City project is a way of ordering the scattering and breakdown of materials around us that, when gathered in one messy pile, creates a structure of temporary stability. The diagrams that give a sense of order to these collected piles of rubble will be used again to parallel the gathering mass of smaller waste in our lives.

After collecting these materials, they will be separated in transparent containers with scribed-in rubble diagrams. Each connection point in the diagram has thread running through it that tangles at each end. The thread is showing a place in time - the process of materials going in and out of order.

All of this waste seems annoying. It gets in the way and needs to be thrown out, cleaned up and carted off. But think of all the waste in our minds. Where does it go? Is it transformed into something useful? Maybe what seems wasteful is broken into parts and converted into bits that remind us of the past or instigate ideas for the future.