Garbage Collage Homage to the Circle (series), 2023
Andy Waddle (AOD)

Reclaimed cardboard, paper, packaging and plastic, acrylic on canvas

A key figure in the Bauhaus movement, Josef Albers was an artist, colour theorist and educator who had a profound influence on visual arts and graphic design from the mid-20th century onwards. Between 1949 and his death in 1976, he painted more than 2,000 variations of squares as part of his now-famous series Homage to the Square. Albers’ immense body of work and his commitment to continuously exploring a singular motif inspired me to commence a new series of works in mid-2023 titled Garbage Collage Homage to the Circle. Although I’ve chosen a different geometry and medium, the arrangement of shapes and the way in which the adjacency of colours influences their interpretation is a direct tribute to Albers. He was ahead of his time in his understanding of visual perception, colour sensitivity and emergent relational phenomena, and I wanted to somehow extend his unique artistic and intellectual approach into contemporary discussions about waste.

The title of the series (the pronunciations of Garbage, Collage and Homage are meant to rhyme) is intentionally playful, but it is also quite literal and serious. Most people have some vague sense of the interrelatedness of everything, yet we tend to think of waste separately, as if waste is not part of our local or global interconnectedness, as if it somehow exists outside of everything else and just magically goes ‘away’ to some other place where it is no longer our concern. The circles in the series symbolise connectedness (or, the need to connect the dots) and, like the concentric rings of a tree, growth. However, the underlying suggestion is that growth should only be pursued with circularity in mind (as opposed to within the context of traditional economics where waste is rarely properly accounted for). In short, these circles invite us to ‘think outside the square’ when it comes to waste.

Whereas Albers’ Homage series consisted of mostly oil paintings and prints, I’ve used mostly discarded paper, cardboard, packaging and plastic. And whereas he painted in a meticulous way so as to avoid the appearance of any texture, I very much want to highlight the texture of the materials and layer them so that their three-dimensionality is prominent. The circles are all hand-cut. In some cases they are stained or torn. They are not necessarily perfectly aligned or proportional. It is garbage, after all, or at least it was until it was salvaged, and that’s the whole point (it’s a feature, not a bug, as the saying goes). This isn’t an homage in name only; the quality of ‘garbage-ness’ is meant to be visible. The goal was to resist the urge to hide any imperfections and to let the materials speak for themselves. While I do enjoy reimagining what a given material could become, I also like to make its provenance conspicuous whenever possible. It’s about prolonging the life of a material as it is, honestly and with minimal intervention or further degradation.

I’d like to think that Albers would appreciate my nod to his work. He wanted people to see colour from a new perspective. My goal is to hopefully get people to see waste from a new perspective.