Zero Waste: Doing It Imperfectly | Nancy Lane 2023

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Since finding her first drawer on the street a few years ago, Nancy Lane has been contemplating different ‘drawer' projects. In this exhibition, she uses drawers conceptually in relation to sustainability and climate change.

The first trigger for this project was the book A Zero Waste Life, which Nancy found in a free ‘little library' in Lyneham. The second was a Clean Up Australia e-newsletter that stated: "We don't need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly; we need millions of us doing it imperfectly".

To Nancy, the drawers symbolise global, systemic ‘boxed in' thinking, a business-as-usual mind frame regardless of intensifying environmental crises. Nonetheless, she has found Canberrans are increasingly committed to doing something - however imperfectly and each in their own way - to help mitigate climate change. Hearing them discuss their lifestyle adjustments to live more sustainably has helped Nancy conjure up these abstract images in the drawers, tinged sometimes with seriousness, sometimes humour.

Nancy counts herself among those trying to model this effort in her own imperfect way, by limiting the raw materials for her art to her street ‘pickings'. May these depictions of systemic complacency juxtaposed with personal commitment inspire you to refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose and recycle.