Continued Life is a reflection on repurposing waste materials consisting of a series of posters and a virtual reality environment. It’s an archive of the fleeting items passing through our lives, the emotion of holding on to them, and the anxiety of letting them go.
The inevitability of wastes passing through our hands creates an urge for us to find new purposes to continue their lives.
Repurposing is a survival skill. My grandmother used a rope as a belt, tissue boxes as trash cans, yoghurt cups as planters, etc. There was a cabinet above the washing machine that contained everything yet to find a purpose. I was conditioned to value possessions in the same way as I was growing up.
While in graduate school for graphic design, I started to observe the waste generated in the iterative process of learning and making, especially paper and plastic due to affordability. Out of habit, I would collect single-sided printer papers and use the white spaces for notes, practice calligraphy with markers over the writings, and then fold and cut them for prototyping. A piece of paper thus would have an extended lifetime, fully scribbled, and possibly stained.
Archiving these items is an affirmation of sustainability practices on an individual level. The work would never be finished, however, for this project, three sets of items are documented: clothing, paper, and cups. The items are collected according to these criteria: 1) the item has an old purpose and a new, personally-defined purpose, 2) the item may be considered waste, and 3) the item has the potential to outlast its original lifetime.
Each set of items are photographed and abstracted into posters.
The documented items are then modelled and imported into a virtual reality environment, where the visitor can look around and reflect on the destined disposal of objects and materials, drawing the conflict between wastefulness and letting go.