A Movement Afoot

   ~ by Beverly Koski

Blue bags, yellow bags and a smallish garbage can are now a common sight along the streets on collection day. There was a time when recycling bags and boxes were not even contemplated. It began in the early nineties. A few started sorting before that. During the late 1980s, my son, on the cutting edge, had a complicated arrangement in his laundry room in Vancouver.

Artwork by Bev Koski

He and his wife would place plastic, newspaper, and bottles on shelves which would be emptied when full into boxes, then carried to their car, and transported to the dump. There was no curb pick up. Only unsorted garbage was collected; trash for most people consisted of everything thrown together no matter what it was. The word re-cycling is a very recent addition to the common vocabulary. It does not appear in my 1959 edition of Oxford dictionary; nor does the word re-use. Mass transformation of used materials is a very recent phenomenon.

But how does this relate to the creation of artwork? I was drawn to collage early in my art education in the mid 1990s. Old dress patterns and fabrics, wall paper, scraps of this and that, old photographs seemed to call out to me to be incorporated into my work. It was exciting and still is. Lately, exhibitions are occurring regularly, the submissions of which require artists to present pieces formed mainly from re-cycled materials. This noticeable increase leads me to wonder this: does a strong societal change of attitude present the background upon which sensitive individuals play out the human response? If so, do artists, fine tuned to the subconscious, present sooner to these influences? Rupert Sheldrake, a British biochemist with a doctorate, proposes that morphic fields exist. These are described as consisting of patterns that govern the development of forms, structures and arrangements. i.e. a mode of transmission of shared informational patterns might exist. This gained tacit acceptance when it was proposed as the theory of collective unconsciousness by Carl Jung, and is now popular with New Age thinkers. To read more on this subject: "A New Science of Life" by R. Sheldrake.

The next time you read a Call to Entry for artworks restricted to those using re-cycled items, give some thought to the notion that you are plugging into a vast human psychic field.

  ~ by Beverly Koski, July 2009