ABOUT
– Biography
– Touring History

PROJECTS
- Driven to New Pastures
– Downtown
– Loving You In Public
– State We Are In
– Fraudulent Behaviour
– No Entry/Access All Areas
– Quietly Collapsed
– Love Song Dedication

IN DEVELOPMENT
– CityScape
– The Paper Station
– Worlds Apart

NEWS
– Upcoming Performances

LINKS
– People & Places

CONTACT
– Email Rosie

During the autumn on 2010 I bought a briquette maker online.  It is a small metal contraption that makes paper bricks that can be used as fuel for a fire.

To make the bricks my partner (who is a high school science teacher) would shred scrap paper from her school and bring it home in garbage bags. I would then soak the shredded paper in a giant tub and pack the wet shreds in the briquette maker, compress and finally bake in the sun/warm location for 48-hours.

In the lead up to winter 2010 I made about 140 bricks.

While I was making and baking the bricks I started thinking about paper usage in offices and recycling in general. I started to think about recycling - as an INDUSTRY and consider whether the fact that something was recyclable had actually made us complacent in terms of packaging. There is a big push to say no to plastic bags, yet packaging and paper and recycled plastic is a huge industry. 

The idea
For 2-months I would collect non-confidential waste paper from a city office (or if it was a residency in a different state or country someone would need to collect for me). This paper could be redundant newspapers, office scrap paper, junk mail, memos anything at all as long as it is paper that would otherwise be placed in the recycle. The paper would be collected weekly and stored at the venue. In effect I would replace their current recycling collection person.

At the end of the 2-months I would spend 2-weeks full-time shredding paper and making/baking bricks. During this time I estimate that I would be able to make about 1000 bricks maybe more depending on how much paper. The making of the bricks would be done in a public space - I anticipate the action of making the bricks in public would pique people's curiosity and they may stop to help and/or have a conversation about what I am doing. The act of making the bricks is a good platform to begin a dialogue about waste.

Using the paper bricks I would then 'build, 'construct' a small desk/workstation, this would take roughly another week - the design is simple - modeled on a workstation not dissimilar to that which you would find in an open plan office. Again this construction/building would happen in public.

Once the workstation was completed I would use it as my desk for two-weeks to write a short 20-30 minute performance lecture that would interweave some of the exchanges I had with people whilst making the bricks and also speak about waste, complacency, excess and greed. The lecture would then be performed in a public space with the paper station.

The Paper Station would then be given to the office whose paper I had used with a small plaque explaining the project and an audio recording/transcript of the lecture. The Paper Station could then become a visitor’s desk.