Sandra Winkworth
GreenWay PickUp 
 
Reused wire, roof gutter mesh, and detritus found along Hawthorne Canal 148 x 30 x 20 cm
 
After years of walking along Hawthorne Canal for some healthercise, I still find unexpected beauty and joy in bird and detritus spotting. Both are indispensable to my art practice. Seeing my full bag of collected rubbish, people often thank me! It’s not only a pollutant pick-up mission to keep our stuff out of the waterways but also a playful and curious GreenWay interaction, like kids collecting shells to decorate sandcastles by the sea. Unlike sandcastles, these fragmented discards, the evidence of our contemporary existence, sit awkwardly in our urban-made nature, unable to meld with the earth. Disconnected from their origins, back in my studio, these diverse, misplaced pieces surprisingly form a cohesive community gathered in a shape representing my GreenWay walking stretch. Or could this form suggest something interrelational between pill-shaped cells like our energy-making mitochondria, a tracheid cell that conducts nutrients and structurally supports plants, with bacilli, bacteria organisms?