Tim Noble & Sue Webster : Upcycling in Art
The Shadow Sculptures
After meeting in college while both studying the Fine Arts, Nobel and Webster teamed up to produce art that is created with trash found and collected from London streets. After arranging the trash into seemingly non-descript piles, a light is projected onto the composition revealing a silhouetted scene of the two artists. This use of light aids the transformation of trash into art without trying to ignore the fact that the images your eyes are so attracted to come from items that are commonly discarded. A goal that is achieved by this technique is the connection of an abstract art to a representational.
In “Dirty White Trash” 1998, the artists used trash from what they had needed to survive during the six months in which they worked to create the project. While the project shows the dirty side of the lives they led over that time period, it also shows -in the silhouette- the more luxurious aspects of their lifestyle, i.e. wine and cigarettes.
Overall, their work depicts tension between opposing themes:
Chaos - Organization
Waste - Recycle
Abstraction - Representation