Here comes everyone
Wasted Museum is a call to all Erithians to come find your old polyester pants buried in a sea wall, bring that weird thing you found on the beach one day, or that irritating thing you found down the end of Manor Road. Framed by a skyline of scrap metal yards, and the Landfill in Rainham, The Exchange will be hosting YoHa’s Wasted Museum and holding a series of workshops that journey with microplastics into outfalls, walking the marsh waste and seawalls, mudlarking and holding open house sessions. We are especially interested in those little things people pick up and take home from the river's edge or the side of the road, dig up in the garden or just find troubling.
The Wasted Museum Workshops
Working with the Exchange we want to reimagine the now absent Erith Museum that occupied the site in the 20th century. The workshops will take place between April and November 2022 at the exchange exploring the relationship between waste, Erith and the Thames. We are asking people to bring wasted objects into the Exchange. The objects will be exhibited at The Exchange from 9th to 20th November 2022 (10:00 - 16:00), and also will be available on this site.We will be catching up with our blog writing on the site.
Please bring your object to The Exchange or when coming to any of the workshops especially Open Day workshops alternativily anyone can fill the wasted form online or contact us for futher help. All objects can be returned post exhibition.
Workshop schedule:
Sunday 10th April 2022
◉Toxic Citizen Science: led by Andy Freeman with YoHa. Andy lectures and demonstrates about toxic environments, especially in the Thames river and surrounding the river.
Andy Freeman is an artist and has lived in close proximity to the Thames most of his adult life. Andy is a lecturer/PhD Candidate specialising in digital journalism, data visualisation and digital interactions at Goldsmiths University of London.
Sunday 29th May 2022
◉Wasted Walk: led by Katie Surridge and YoHa's Graham Harwood. We all walked along Manor Road fly tip and found many objects with a spot of metal fishing at the River Darent. After a quick pic'nic webrought back our curated rubish to The Exchange and examined the objects.
Katie Surridge descends from a family of waste workers, Rag and Bone men as well as waste barge masters. She is a mixed media artist specialising in metal casting. Katie’s fabrication creates links with skills from the past as a way to understand the origins of her own practice. Humour plays an important part in connecting with people through the social process of her art.
Sunday 19th June 2022
◉Open Day 1: let by YoHa. YoHa put up a store of found objects in the craft market inside The Exchange. Open Day workshops are the space where people can bring any objects they find. There is no booking necessary.
Thursday 21th July 2022
◉Open Day 2: led by volunteers of The Exchange. The Exchange set up a table where people can bring any objects they found. There is no booking necessary.
Thursday 25th August 2022 15:00 - 19:00
◉Open Day 3: led by YoHa. Open Day workshops are the space where people can bring any objects they find. There is no booking necessary.
Saturday 10 September 2022 10:30 - 13:00
◉Wasted Walk: as part of ERITH MADE 2022 Town Festival, led by YoHa. YoHa will walk with participants to find objects around Erith. More details will be published nearer the date. Please check this site again. Booking via The Exchange Website.
Thursday 18 September 2022
10:30 – 12:00 ages 8 - 12 years old
13:30 – 15:00 ages 12+ and above (inc. adults)
◉Willow Pattern Pottery Drawing: led by artist Katie Surridge with YoHa, Reimagine Wasted Monsters from old pieces of broken willow pattern pottery. Please bring willow pattern pottery pieces you may have lying around. Booking via The Exchange Website.
Thursday 13 October 15:00-19:00
◉Open Day 4: led by YoHa. Open Day workshops are the space where people can bring any objects they find. There is no booking necessary.
Saturday 12 November 15:00-17:30
◉Dreaming with Waste - The future imagination of Waste: led by artists and art psychotherapists Dr Jill Westwood and Lesley Morris with YoHa, at the Wasted Museum exhibition space. Booking via The Exchange Website.
Here is the message from Jill and Lesley:
Welcome to the Wasted Museum. We are Jill Westwood and Lesley Morris, and we invite you to join us to create a social dream matrix, through which explore constellations of meaning around the significance of artefacts in the Wasted Museum exhibition. As the landscapes we make and the objects we discard sink into the strata, what will we have left behind?
What kind of ancestors will we be? What will be the signs of our civilisation to the unborn inhabitants of the world-to-be? What might be future fossils?
Social Matrix Dreaming (see note below) is an activity where dreams are shared in a group. These might be night dreams or active imagination associations that occur during the group. The purpose is for exploration of social phenomenon and for making meaning as a group on what arises in the dream matrix. The dream matrix will be facilitated by us, and followed by art making and discussion.
We also encourage you to observe and listen to any dreams you might have leading up to this event.
Here is a the link to the film Cosmic Dreaming of pre~historic~futurology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHMpbDrsDKA&t=15s
(note: Developed by Gordon Lawrence at the Tavistock Institute 1982)
Jill Westwood and Lesley Morris
Lesley and Jill are artists and art psychotherapists. They have developed a collaboration over the past 10 years through the experience of living and working along the shores of the river Thames. Guided by a new materialist perspective they have come to trust art as a process of inquiry, to unfold understanding of the significance of materiality, space and place; leading them deeper into connections and entanglements with others, humans and more than human, in space-time-mattering. As artists they take this approach to respond to the call of the wild and a desire to be earthed closer in/to the cosmic unknown.