"Carbon Footprints" ~ Charcoal Still Life Drawings of my Trash

Each charcoal drawing is an item discarded from my own life.
And like any archeological exhibition, each piece has been examined, catalogued and presented for your interpretation.
What does my rubbish tell you about my world?

What story does your trash tell about you?

Want to see what art I’m throwing away next? Visit my blog for "Name that Sketch"

See current Carbon Footprints

I grew up in England, just a school bus trip away from a genuine excavated Roman Villa. We were told that the people who lived there regularly ate oysters. How did they know? They found a huge pile of oyster shells out back. It occurs to me that our western disposable consumer lifestyle should make our own rubbish tips and landfills treasure troves of information for archeologists in the future.

This “wealth” of evidence neatly contrasts with the idea that our Digital Age may be creating a new Dark Age for future historians. As more and more documents, letters, newspapers, books and even diaries are becoming digital, they are increasingly at risk from proprietary software and obsolete hardware storage. Tried reading a floppy disc lately?

History is a fascinating balancing act - interpreting the physical remains using the surviving written documents and vice versa. It is never a complete picture - but what happens if a large chunk of the written evidence is lost and all that is left is the things we threw away? What picture will our detritus paint?

And this is not an activity solely reserved for future observers. It is fun reading your interpretations of my garbage on the blog in "Name that Sketch"
So what art did you find in your trash last week?