I fell in love with the tip: ode to a wasteland

It’s not every day you’re asked to put on a gold suit and dance around a tip with a perfect stranger. That’s precisely what Eugenia Lim’s latest work involves, raising ideas about the environment, sustainability and life.

Eugenia Lim, Jennifer Anderson and Steve Boulter at the local tip.Credit:Tim Hillier

When asked to make a work for this week’s Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial, Lim wanted to make a piece about the ecology of the town. After a site visit, she “sort of fell in love with the tip” and wanted to centre it rather than have it on the periphery.

Just as we’ve had to rethink our consumption and how much rubbish we create, we need to be aware of where whatever is produced ends up, she says. “It’s actually somewhere each household is connected to, it’s where they drop off their whitegoods that don’t work any more or where they pick up their mulch.”

Eugenia Lim’s work, Shelters for Kyneton.Credit:Tim Hillier

Lim was struck by the masses of birds, bright red poppies growing up through the rubbish, plants and weeds, “things that had made their life there”. Even inanimate objects tell a story of a previous life: a battered pink kid’s bike, a cuckoo clock, plastic flowers, a crucifix, whitegoods standing like sentries.

Lim approached tip worker Steve Boulter and Macedon Ranges Shire mayor Jennifer Anderson to participate in the piece, which she devised based on conversations about their work. “Steve can do these burnouts in the bulldozer and manage this heavy machinery, he’s got these inherent knowledges that have taken years to build up … Jennifer is out there in the community and actively working on committees around waste and regeneration.

The material used in the gold suits is also known as mylar, used for emergency or space blankets.Credit:Tim Hillier

“It wasn’t an accident that I reached out to those people, who are usually at different levels of social hierarchy,” Lim says. “That’s an interesting thing about art, it can dissolve those boundaries.

“I was conscious, too, of being an outsider, someone who is not from the town. We were all coming to this work with some degree of unfamiliarity.”

I fell in love with the tip: ode to a wasteland
Source: Philippines Alive