Monika Thomas: The more serious side of toys makes me ponder...

From 2010 through to the end of 2011 I was walking the local “tipface”, wearing steel boots, safety jacket and gloves. I spend my time at Wylie Bay Waste Disposal site to experience the landscape, watch a dozer perform its daily burial rituals and to take photographs as part of my final year BA art project (Curtin University). I decided to create this blog as a summery of the project, revised and edited - during a semester in Creative Thinking with Assistant Professor Emma Robertson of UNSW Art and Design.

In my approach I was first inspired by Richard Long and his nature walks. I was encouraged to follow my own instinct in finding out how we, as a community, have made a mark on this once unspoiled piece of land and reflect this back to my audience.

Our landfills are alive with the sounds of heavy machinery, birds, cars coming and going and the falling and crushing of what we gladly dispatch from our lives - household waste. Not unlike the birds scavenging for food, I dared to collect some items for my artistic explorations along the way - with permission from Esperance Shire Council.

As I walked, shoes littering the tip surface became my metaphor for how we journey through life wanting, using, marking and discarding. Toys littering the tip face instantly grabbed my attention. Once loved and cherished - with their bright colours and cheerful expressions still intact- they became my symbols for unbridled human desire and quickly fading attachments.

I became increasingly interested in the connection between human desire and waste. Like most of us I take part in the never-ending rituals of giving and taking - it connects me with family and friends, to culture, to the economy and ultimately to our local landfill. Even though this blog is not about "finger pointing" it does touch on moral and ethics. Essentially my work is a visual inquiry and a call to take responsibility for the "after life" of our consumer goods.

Countless toys are daily banished from our lives to landfills with little or no thought given to the materials’ properties and their environmental impact. Not only will some outlive their former owners by hundreds of years whilst suffering a slow death in the landscape - they will do so leaching their chemicals into the soil and waterways.

Unlike industrial waste which is tightly controlled, local authorities have no way of telling what is in those sealed house-hold rubbish bags when they change ownership to our local shires on collection days.

Choices and Consequences

What sort of product knowledge guides our choices when we buy toys and other goods?

Emma Robertson, an artist and Program Director of the Bachelor of Design degree at the University of New South Wales in Sydney (Australia), talks about the connection between the need to remember and human survival in one of her lectures (Creative Thinking):

'Systems of memory ensured survival, and in pre-civilisation it took precedence over creativity and other modes of thinking. If early homo sapiens forgot, it was not only a matter of not remembering, it was often a matter of no longer living: if you could not remember which snakes were poisonous; which fruit was nutritious; where your secret supplies of food were; where quicksands were located, then you did not get many more opportunities to try to remember anything else! The first known calendars were scratches on stones, notches on sticks, and knots tied on strings to document the passing of days and the movement of the moon: these were memory systems to facilitate recall." (Emma Robertson)

Today we have the most sophisticated memory systems in the history of human kind and boundless knowledge at our finger tips. Yet, we are unable to make choices which ensure long-term human survival and environmental sustainability. Our landfills have become the quicksands of the future! Is it possible that the time has come for creativity to move closer to the forefront of our thinking to enable us to make better choices? How would we act differently?

How serious toy safety alone has become is evident in this video. Please consider that "recalls" usually end up in landfills too.

I think a simple conclusion can be drawn: If it is not safe for humans it is not safe for the environment either.

Health Watch - Toy Saftey