Junkyard Cairns

The backdrop of the Chicagoland suburban sprawl lighted my childhood. The days and nights were filled with brightly colored, mass produced toys and objects geared towards old-school, innocent childlike play. My work is exploring the consumption and materialism of the Anthropocene through the framework of the junkyard, the playground, and the wooden chest of my disremembered youth.

The foraged “junk” from our landscape becomes recontextualized within the objects. Foraging discarded remnants of materials from our landscape that arise from our capitalist consumer structures present in our society. Utilizing the foraged fragments within the sculptures, I seek to recontextualize and highlight the superfluous waste in our environment. The broken fragments of plastic, ceramic tile, metal, and other materials serve as visual metaphors for the transient nature of our consumption and the structures we currently live in. 

The compositions I create are lighthearted, bouncy, and a bit mischievous. They examine our consumer society, and the spaces of learned collecting and consuming. Through my work, I aim to provoke reflection on the consequences of our excessive consumption and question the idea of our disposable culture. By breathing new life into these fragments incorporated with the work, I am to give animacy to the forgotten artificial fragments littering the landscape leading to a shift towards a more sustainable and mindful approach to consumption. Through my making I am processing and cataloging moments from the world around me.