Adapt

Often observing coastlines and waterways as accumulation points or signifiers, Liv’s work is concerned with environments in flux.

For Adapt, the Artist draws on her practice of beach-combing with the found object Broken Black Sand. Iron ore captured by the fractured glass screen is smelted for steel near the beach in New Zealand where it was found, making connections between e-waste, site, and raw elements.

In her new series Eyes, personal histories are embedded within the donated lenses, and yet, they look outward.

Using silica and silver as reflective grounds, she makes connections between e-waste, where it can end up, and raw elements around us that are essential in the production of these technologies. Mining the donated phones themselves for material, Liv was most interested in the tiny camera lenses.

Through Eyes, an intimate record of user experience has already been captured; in terms of seeing, absorbing and remembering the world, as well as experimenting with and creating self-image. Made into wearable pins, these millennial artefacts once again bear witness.

Currently, there are more unused, than used mobile phones per head of population in Australia. Research in sustainable practice continues to question the methods of reclaiming, reusing and recycling materials in a global economy, based on built-in obsolescence.

“It takes a ton of ore to get 1 gram of gold, the same amount can be collected from recycling the materials in 41 mobile phones. The growing amount of e-waste is a worldwide challenge. According to the United Nations, all the countries in the world combined, generate a staggering 44.7 million tonnes of e-waste annually. Only 20% is reported to be collected and recycled.”

source: mobilemuster.com.au

“Collaboration has been an important element of Adapt; each artist identifying and interpreting preferred materials from e-waste and exchanging materials with each other in the making of their pieces. Awareness of the damaging environmental impacts of consumer culture has motivated this research-based exhibition.

Adapt seeks to explore materiality and to question the sizeable footprint for small handheld devices.

For this exhibition, the three artists put a call out for broken/unused mobile phones from their community of friends and family. This urban harvesting resulted in a sizeable stack of old mobile phones.

The aim was to safely deconstruct the phones to explore their contents, interpreting the found materials…to attempt to identify and reclaim the precious metals.”

- Belinda Newick. Adapt Curator, 2019

“Mindful of the collective effort to create mobile phones, the value of resources contained within, conscious of the impact of mining and the draw on resources to meet consumer demand for upgrades, Adapt seeks to explore materiality and to question the sizeable footprint for small hand held devices’” 

- Belinda Newick. Adapt Curator, 2019

Belinda Newick’s work explores cultural hybridity and place. She captures the emotions, imprints and memories of life through subtle applied surface textures and words on various metals. For Adapt Belinda explores the framework and metal backing plates for iPhones, removing all trace of the inner workings to reveal the structure. Drawing connections to the shape and form of poured precious gold ingots questions implied value. These phones indispensable in our daily lives when functioning contain precious metals and rare earth elements.  If we could see the shiny gold would we apply more value?