Sort Trash With Me!

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Sort Trash With Me!

Close up of trash inside a brown paper bag. A brown paper bag filled with trash leaning against a bench. A blue reach extender is laying across the bench.
Still from a video of 'Sort Trash With Me!' Kate and their classmates are sorting trash that has been dumped on a pedestal in the Visual Arts Building. Still from a video of 'Sort Trash With Me!' Kate and their classmates are sorting trash that has been dumped on a pedestal in the Visual Arts Building. Still from a video of 'Sort Trash With Me!' Kate and their classmates are sorting trash that has been dumped on a pedestal in the Visual Arts Building. Two brown paper bags and two recycled jars full of categorized trash, and a pile of used blue nitrile gloves.

For this performance project I took a leisurely walk around my neighborhood and Iowa City, ending at the Visual Arts Building for my Intermedia class. I used a reach extender to pick up discarded things I found on the ground. I followed some loose rules on my walk:

  1. Pick up everything* you find
  2. When the bag is full, stop

*Exclude food, broken glass, and anything that will not fit in the bag


When the bag was full, I went to class. I set up signs to direct participants to wear gloves and sort the trash into three categories:

  1. Three-Dimensional Things
  2. Flat Things
  3. Tiny Bits of Things

I invited my classmates to help me sort, and we got to work, backed by a track I had made of bird calls and garbage trucks.


This performance marks the beginning of my use of trash as a medium. From what I gathered I saved whatever remnants were salvagable (including used gloves) and used them for collage and sculpture, but I still have plenty of trash from this project to work with. I enjoy turning something that's been discarded into something valuable again, especially if it means getting garbage off the street.