Beautiful Trash

Installation

Under the glittering façade of the contemporary city exists its dirty underbelly: the garbage, the unwanted refuse, the trash.

Overflowing from the city’s bins and skips, this waste is collected in the corners and crevices of our urban environment. Controlled but never assuaged, these dead objects, void and stripped of purpose, are beaten into the architecture and trodden into the ground: an enduring fixture on the city landscape.

Mel Upton’s Beautiful Trash explores the residue and fall-out of the current consumer-driven climate through the careful recreation of found objects and trash. Colonising the stairwell of The Order of Melbourne, these re-constituted replicas of dead and exhausted objects transcend their purpose in this new time and place to become part of the interior structure, existing as permanent monuments to human consumption.