The Collection

A glimpse into a small wooden drawer reveals a number of objects which at first glance appear to be of minerals and fossils. Labelled and stored in shallow cardboard trays, they seem to be carefully assembled by a dedicated collector. Yet all the items including cardboard trays and drawer are made of waste material. One day our plastic waste will be part of the earth's geology. The process has already started. Only fifty years after the beginning of plastic mass production, newspaper articles report plastic sand grains at Hawaiian beaches and huge masses of plastic waste trapped in the currents of the South Pacific, waiting to be deposited, becoming part of a new geological layer. As an artist with a background in archaeology, Alix Poscharsky has always been interested in what future Archaeologists might find. In this work her focus shifted to the earth's geology, provocatively suggesting that the colours of future geology might be those of our waste. This project reminds us that in the big Geological picture we are just another species fortunate enough to thrive on earth, like the dinosaurs before us, and that we are just as vulnerable as them.