Enter Josephine Dimbleby, the newest HeadSpace artist in residence. Since her arrival in Japan she has been hoarding superfluous packaging, and in just one week collected enough to make her own suit and accessories out of it. Resembling a biohazard protective suit with a samurai helmet, or something worn in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Josephine donned her suit at the Sento festival in Nara.
Josephine on the making of the suit and its accoutrements:
“How many times have I returned from travelling to find my bags lined with flyers, notes, tickets, plastic bags, badges, postcards. I turn out the bag and sort through the droppings, but with the exception of personal contact – a name, an email – the rest normally ends up in the recycling. Paper and plastic memories? If I need to remind myself of a journey through perforated scraps, the documentation of having simply paid for it, then surely it’s been a pretty poor sort of journey. I decided before I arrived in Japan that I wanted to make something from the flotsam and jetsam I picked up, to turn it into a memorable experience in itself.
“I knew that the impeccable service culture in Japan extended to the presentation of goods, but I had no idea. No real concept of how a shop assistant might spend twenty minutes or more painstakingly wrapping items which had already been pre-packaged by their manufacturers to a ridiculous level, and THEN place the wrapped and bagged items inside yet another, larger plastic bag. With some tape to seal it. And a sticker. A bag of Japanese sweets from the combini – a plastic bag, to cover the plastic bag, that encases the individual plastic bag of each sweet. Is our world so germy and sweet-threatening that a full three layers is required?
“From the time I arrived, I started collecting the bags and packaging from my own personal usage. The tourist part of me loved it: even the most mundane of supermarket salty crisp packs, unreadable to me, seemed to contain messages of joy and promise. I amassed an astonishing amount of plastic waste in just one week. Stunned, I started thinking, what might be the outcome of this protection mania? Followed to its logical conclusion, we’ll use up two thirds of the world’s natural resources packaging up the other third, then find ourselves in a fix.
“Imagine if you can a time when nothing can be ‘new’ any longer. All that we have, we glean from the landfills of the past with incinerator furnaces regarded as a long-distant crime against humanity. Imagine when our survival depends on our individual abilities to craft from the discards of our blissfully wasteful society. When we mine the plastic wrappings of today for some semblance of protection in a harsh and unforgiving new climate, but still finding the depth of spirit to decorate our clothes, celebrate traditional customs and maintain our day-to-day routines despite the threat of extinction.”
