The Re-imagining Waste Art Project—Regenesis Journey

Janelle Randall-Court

The Blue Mountains Creative Arts Network is partnering with artist and cultural worker, Janelle Randall-Court, a Bundjalung/ Yaegl woman who lives in the Blue Mountains. Janelle and BMCAN would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land of the Darug and Gundungurra people and pay respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

Janelle’s commitment to ‘Caring for Country’ has inspired her to continue to help people re-imagine domestic waste. This builds on her previous work with the Aboriginal Cultural Resource Centre (ACRC) resulting in the documentary, No Waste on Country—Leaving Only Footprints and on her Tipp Wear fashion project, featuring fashion items rescued from landfill, cleaned and displayed on local catwalks. These works were featured in the ‘Waste to Art’ exhibition in Katoomba and Parkes NSW, promoting the message: “Recycle, Reuse, Relove”, with the aim to reduce landfill in waste management.

The Re-Imagining Waste Art Project aligns with Janelle’s other major work Treasures, a contemporary dance work based on the iconic Satin Bower Bird. Treasures takes the audience on a journey to discover the charismatic male of the species who historically collects and adorns his bower (his ‘love shack’) with natural treasures such as flowers, berries and an assortment of other strategic items.

However, sadly today these bowers are littered with a wide selection of plastic and other man-made waste which is all too easy for the males to acquire.

 

With permission from the photographer

The Project

The Reimagining Waste Art Project has received funding from the Wentworth Health Community Wellbeing Grants program for bushfire-affected areas in the Blue Mountains. The project aims to improve community wellbeing through engagement with the arts to change the way we think about the things we throw away, and participate in sensate based creative play, to create art works that we can share with others.

The project will specifically target key groups, such as young people and families, as well as the general community who have been experiencing heightened anxiety resulting from the severe bushfires that ravaged parts of the Blue Mountains area in 2020, followed by ongoing anxiety resulting from the COVID pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.

This project demonstrates Aboriginal thought leadership in addressing an important environmental issue, as well as showing ways in which the arts can contribute to community engagement with local Aboriginal people and participate in ‘Caring for Country’ and heighten environmental awareness that challenges our ‘throw-away’ consumer culture.

Launch Event—Film Screenings

We will launch the RE-IMAGINE project with the screening of two films on Saturday 4 December at the Bates Hall, Blackheath, at 4.30-6.30pm.

No Waste on County: Leave Only Footprints, has been re-edited by Lyle Diedrich to provide a 15 min introduction to the relationship between Caring for Country in the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, and how we treat waste.

Waste Land, is the brilliant documentary by Lucy Walker, featuring the artist Vik Muniz on a singularly ambitious project. She follows Vik to Jardim Gramacho, a vast landfill established in 1970 north of Rio de Janeiro, photographing its catadores, pickers of recyclable materials, and filming the way that Vik collaborates with them in transforming these photos into portraits created with recyclable materials. Vik’s purpose is to inspire his pickers to see themselves in a new way and even to re-imagine their lives.

 

Waste Art Workshops

Janelle will lead community art workshops whereby participants will explore multiple ways to engage with this important issue in a creative and fun way, transforming a problem area with associated feelings of guilt and anxiety, into one of creative solutions, thus contributing to building a more resilient community of connectedness to one another, and to our natural world.

As a member of Resilience Blue Mountains, Janelle seeks to aligns with the work of Blue Mountains City Council to engage the community in envisioning our future based on the theme of ‘resilience’ in terms of our relationship with one another in our neighbourhoods, with our natural environment, and with the Darug and Gundungurra people who are the traditional ‘owners’ of the Blue Mountains.

During the workshops, participants will explore:

  • What role does waste play in our lives and community?
  • Waste and how to better ‘care for Country’
  • Creating artworks using recovered or gathered waste materials
  • Discussing the meaning of the artwork created.

REIMAGINE—THE REGENESIS JOURNEY EXHIBITION

BMCAN will work with Janelle and the Planetary Health Initiative, to run a half day workshop-exhibition with the following program on how to reimagine our relationship with the natural world and learn to envision a future living within our bio-regional ecological boundaries.  This workshop recognises that the roots of our crisis are epistemic. They are anchored in our deeply held worldview about the nature of reality and the privileging of humans over all other species and lifeforms.

Program: 1.30pm to 4.30pm – to be held late September 2022 at the Planetary Health rooms.

1.30pm – Welcome and Reimagine Project

  1. Janelle Randall Court – reimagining our relationship to a throw-away culture
    1. The Waste to Art project
    2. Show video clip of Janelle talking about waste and caring for Country
    3. Show video interviews with workshop participants

 

2.00pm – Planetary Health Initiative

  1. Lis Bastian – the Planetary Health Initiative and the steps towards a regenerative society here in the Blue Mountains

2.30pm – Thinking differently – the first step towards a regenerative society

  1. Barbara Lepani and Janelle Randall-Court: Thinking differently – inner transformation—healing the wounds of our psychic alienation between mind, spirit and body and between ourselves and the Earth and all its lifeforms.
    1. The ‘whitefella’ dilemma – connecting to Country
    2. Working in pairs – developing a mindmap that expresses this story
    3. Discussing insights

3.15pm – The Creative Journey to Regenesis

  1. Barbara Lepani: The role of creatives in creating the new ‘walking together knowledge’ story of REGENESIS – an Action Plan
    1. Story telling – literary and film
    2. Visual arts
    3. Performing arts
    4. Cultural workers
    5. Live Music.

Waste to Art with BMCAN

BMCAN has a long history of celebrating waste to art through Peter Shoemark’s sculptures that are a regular feature of our BMCAN Gallery at The Edge Cinema complex in Katoomba.

Featured here:

Daisies—metal daisies and leaves

Rose—coffee pot and golf sticks with ceramic rose

March of the Molluscs—recycled wood, metal and marbles