Community & social practice · Arts action against pollution · initially with Wendy Ross

The WasteArt Foundation

Arts action against pollution — educational sculpture workshops and curated exhibitions of art, craft and fashion made entirely from waste. A partnership of EnviroServ Holdings, the Department of Arts & Culture and Business and Arts South Africa, on whose executive board Celia de Villiers served from 2004 to 2010.

The WasteArt Foundation turned the problem of waste into a public art programme. Across Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal it ran educational sculpture workshops and curated exhibitions of art, craft and fashion made entirely from discarded materials — staged in shopping malls and public squares to reach broad, everyday audiences rather than gallery-goers.

The initiative began as a collaboration with the artist Wendy Ross — predating the Intuthuko collective — and grew into a foundation backed by EnviroServ Holdings, the Department of Arts & Culture and Business and Arts South Africa. De Villiers served on its executive board from 2004 to 2010, co-curating the WasteArt: Craft, Art & Fashion Show (from Sandton Square, Johannesburg, in 2004) and the touring WasteArt expos that followed in 2006, 2008 and 2010. The WasteArt Expo was nominated for the National Excellence in Innovation and Sustainability Awards (2005).

School visits were central to the programme. At a Lenasia school, children built flowers, birds and a life-sized tree from discarded plastic bottles and packaging — learning to see waste as material, and pollution as something art can name and rework. The approach was carried into the Grade 11 Life Orientation textbook (Oxford University Press, 2010), and the paper The WasteArt Foundation — Arts in Action was presented at the Fourth World Environmental Education Conference, Durban (2007).