Notes on (briefly) There
Somage Find Foods
Take Hold of the Clouds
Who’s Afraid of Public Spaces
To:
Riso Zine: Hyper Sensitive Club
Risograph from Sketch
Mememorbillia
Melbourne International Student Week
Daydream Lullaby
A Cat’s Wet Dream
Garden of Wonders
Long Way Home
Publications
Sustainable Play - The Upcycled Museum of Curiosities
What if waste could dream again
— if the scraps we cast aside began whispering new worlds into being?
Rooted in early childhood creativity and material literacy, the work transforms upcycling from a process of repair into a philosophy of wonder — a way to think, learn, and design otherwise.
01. MATERIAL LITERACY
Receipts, wrappers, and fragments of foil are not leftovers but syllables of a forgotten language. When scanned, layered, and collaged, they form a grammar of gloss, crease, and residue. Material literacy is the act of learning to read this texture — to see plastic as metaphor, packaging as poetry, waste as narrative.
In doing so, sustainability ceases to be a moral instruction and becomes an aesthetic literacy, teaching us how perception itself can be re-stitched.
02. STORY NARRATIVE AS PROVOCATION
The scene unfolds like a tableau — half workshop, half theatre — where labour and delight are indistinguishable. Their tools clink and hum; scissors become instruments, bottle caps turn into buttons, discarded spoons glint like silver thread. It is a celebration of making, of play as sustenance.
Visually, the drawing draws deeply from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1490–1510), whose panoramic world stages the plenitude and folly of human imagination. Like Bosch’s triptych, this upcycled scene reveals a cosmos within a flat plane — a multitude of stories blooming simultaneously, each a metaphor for creation, consumption, and renewal. The composition mirrors his logic of magnification: every detail self-contained yet connected, every gesture echoing a larger system. In this sense, the drawing becomes a microcosm of the world —
a garden of discarded things re-enchanted, a choreography of waste and wonder.
03. THE UPCYCLED MUSEUM OF CURIOSITIES
This speculative museum is built from surplus, populated by creatures of waste and wonder. A stapler sprouts legs, a fork performs as a dancer, a mannequin wears a gown of foil. It echoes the cabinets of curiosity but re-casts them for an age of ecological urgency. Each object is a provocation — asking, What if I could be seen differently? In this museum, delight becomes the first step toward reflection; curiosity becomes the seed of change.