The garbage artist who will make you rethink trash

A few years ago, the Toronto mixed-media artist Georgia Dickie was given a stack of Tim Hortons cups by her grandfather, who mistakenly thought he could retroactively collect Roll Up the Rim points. 

"I have them, I may as well try and use them," she remembers thinking. She went to work on a suite of small coffee cup assemblages that turns the idea of high and low materials on its head. 

"I can use a discarded coffee cup just in the same way that I can use a cool piece of rusty metal," she says.

Once she started paying more attention to mundane and overlooked items, she saw them as aesthetically worthwhile objects with their own complex histories.

"From my perspective," Dickie says, "[this method] is a way of opening up my world."

And it is where the underlying philosophy of Dickie's practice emerges. By looking closely at the world — unburdened by conventions of beauty, exceptionality and value — we may see objects, relationships and assumptions anew.

To learn about the artist's unique sense of vision and order, I visited Dickie's studio as she settled back into work after having a baby. Watch as the artist shows off her materials and methods in the first instalment of Local Colour, a new video series from CBC Arts, streaming below.

As we walked through her workspace, Dickie told me about some of the major influences that shaped her artistic sensibility. Chief among them were her parents. 

Her father is an artist and a property master for films who kept a large inventory of objects in the basement of her childhood home. He often worked with found objects, and Dickie recalled the bins full of fake jewelry and other collected props, fragments and curiosities. "It was an amusement park of cool stuff," she says. Her mother, who's an artist and clothing designer, had similarly been drawn to what Dickie calls "prettiness, but with edge." 

Together, her parents gave her "unending permission," Dickie says. "I can use this in an artwork and I don't have to justify it," she remembers thinking to herself. "It just felt like my brain was on fire."

Dickie studied sculpture at OCAD University in Toronto, where she began making large-scale works that utilized found objects. She recalls being energized by the idea of incorporating "big, dense, heavy materials" in her work. 

How Many Antennae, from 2017, was made years after she left school, but it's representative of her larger works. The piece is a constellation of found objects, incorporating wooden beams, rusted metal, a ceramic plate, a toilet seat and delicate wire arches. The composition is precarious, and Dickie's interest seems to be in the work's exploration of balance and instability.

"For a long time, [working on a large scale] really satisfied what I was trying to do," she says. "But I started to feel like I was relying on the scale and the density of the materials as a way to validate the works."

There were also practical limitations to this approach. Transportation and storage concerns were at the front of her mind when she was collecting mammoth industrial objects, like, a ten-foot-wide satellite dish. 

The COVID lockdowns marked a turning point in Dickie's practice. With her world pared down to the one minute walk between her house and studio, she wondered if she could make a series of work using only materials she found along the way.

Coffee cups were one option, as was the rubbish that littered the street. Now, her materials could fit into her pocket. "It meant I was maybe more likely to take a risk with material I wouldn't normally use — and it's more fun."

For Dickie, the process and the logistics of art making can't be separated from the work itself. As she took me around her studio, she noted that many of her sculptures are packed up in cardboard boxes. 

In response, she began to make cardboard box sculptures, filling them with the detritus she was collecting. The boxes allowed her to rethink the very function of storage.

"It irritates me that you create this work, you give it a chance to be seen and then it goes back into a storage compartment. And then what is it at that point?" 

Rather than being the terminal point of the work, storage could become a new beginning.

In one piece, she stuffed a blue cardboard box with orange packaging, tattered cloth and debris. On one of the panels, Dickie affixed two printed images of garbage bags and the word "strong," which serves as an ironic counterpoint to the fragility of the materials. Here, in content and in form, there is a tension between strength and vulnerability, permanence and disposability.

Fully embracing chance, Dickie chose not to protectively package the boxes when she shipped them to the gallery Soft Opening in London. Instead, she folded them up, taped them and sent them as is.

"I was open to the idea of the works falling apart during shipping. Things always break, things always get damaged." In every sense, this work is in constant flux.

To Dickie, the life of an object — from creation and use to decay — is all part of the work. From a discoloured metal beam to a stray wooden block, from an Amazon box to a trampled coffee cup, her materials have all been exposed to time, touch and the forces of the world. 

"My job," she says, "feels like bringing together things that may not normally be brought together in an effort for both myself and the viewer to look at their world a little differently."

For Dickie, found objects carry the marks of the world around them. Using them as material is a way to reflect on what we throw away, what we hold onto and why.