Plastic Waste-Made Installations

Innovation is bringing us new hope

Graduate student Katie May Boyd makes use of plastic waste in a unique way with the Foreign Garbage installation. Boyd creates a plethora of beckoning cats out of molds filled with waste plastic gathered from Central Saint Martins over a nine month period. She wants to draw focus on the inefficient plastic waste processes and shows it through the Japanese Maneki-neko cat. The specific cat was chosen due to its mass production in China, and Boyd wanted to represent that sense of overproduction.

The Foreign Garbage installation draws attention to the disposal of expanded polystyrene by delivering an alternative way to create deflated polystyrene. To create the cat structures, she begins by dissolving the waste with chemicals and recasts them in molds. Dissolving was the ideal technique for the installation because alternative methods such as melting, sheet formation and cuts would create waste.