Hazel Stileman - BA (Hons) Fine Art
Manchester
The waste that we have persists. A lost or discarded object becomes a part of the landscape- a synthetic piece of the synthetic city park.
Through wondering and looking, the things we leave behind appear to me as possibilities of transformation. Found object tells us a story about its past, and I hope to give it a new future through reconstitution.
Waste in the park evolves seasonally. In the winter, a plethora of abandoned singular gloves cover the city- forever alone, but united in their masses. This strikes me as melancholic, which makes me question the emotional value that we give inanimate objects.
I scan the streets wherever I walk. The collection of these gloves that have been rendered useless in their separation was a rigorous process. Through the archiving and reimaging of my ever-growing collection, I feel that I am connecting with the individual behind the garment. From children’s mittens to construction worker gloves, each piece becomes a trace of the person who wore it, maybe loved it and now misses its presence.
By taking the abandoned to repurpose and reimagine it through both print and the digital, the lost and lingering object transforms into something immortal, representing its permanence as a voided memory in our landscape.
Relief press archives the mere traces and textures left by the glove’s impression- it loses its solidity, but it is memorialised in the 2D. By translating one process through more, the prints are reformed and their memories are made physical in new ways. They are a perpetual reminder of the lost in the landscape. The digital realm accentuates the persistence of our waste through the permanence of virtuality- these gloves will never age or spoil due to their digital nature. Taking one object and seeing how its meaning evolves through process transforms the mundane glove into a symbol of possibility.
