Bottlescape

During a visit to Beijing, China in 2015, I observed the extreme attention to detail designers have awarded everyday consumerist products to make them attractive. 

I began to contemplate bottled water and other beverages, a modern necessity in China’s fast-paced and polluted, high-rise urban landscape, and set myself the task to buy a different bottle from a different vendor every day of my stay. 

This task has fed three primary outcomes.

Firstly, it fueled a constant desire to seek new encounters with the urban landscape of Beijing and its inhabitants. Every day of my travel I walked a different route to a different location and met different people. 

Secondly, the bottles form a tangible record of my encounters.

Thirdly, the bottles have become a valuable inspiration-bank for my artistic practice (and stimulus for future projects and travel).

Upon returning to Australia with the twenty-nine bottles – bought from supermarkets, street vendors, vending machines, food outlets, convenience stores and a post office – I have re-made the forms in porcelain: a material with which China has a long heritage. 

The throwaway plastic forms are ‘value-added’ with a longevity and fragility that porcelain inherently offers, signifying both the over-value-adding processes of marketplace rivalry and the fragility of our relationship with nature as we consume these commodities en masse. 

Banner photograph by Grant Hancock
Install photos courtesy Zeea's Eatery, Tony & Marks, 2016
Exhibited 2015: 2015 City of Hobart Art Prize, 2015, Tasmania, Australia. Download the exhibition catalogue.
Exhibited 2016: Zeea's Eatery, Tony & Marks, 2016, Glenunga, South Australia, Australia.