Home Improvements

"Waste is a symptom of expired empathy, a kind of failed relationship that leads to the dumping of one by the other."
Jonathan Chapman, 2005

Home Improvements is a series of photographs and a short film that document domestic objects found at recycling centres in London and South West England. Inspired in part by Jonathan Chapman's Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and Empathy, Home Improvements presents an observation of the unwanted in the context of environmental crisis. The series was commissioned by Pavilion as part of the Pavilion Commissions Programme 2007.

Every weekend queues of traffic form outside waste disposal sites; consumers clearing the way for their latest purchase, waiting to dump items they have queued to acquire not long before. Wrenched out of time and domestic context, these objects are left uprooted and absurd.

Huddled together in their multiplying numbers, the TVs, fridges and sinks are ominous portents of an unsustainable future. Individually they tell another story, their stickers and stains revealing clues to former existences in the households they once served.

Home Improvements raises questions about our emotional attachment to such items. Why do relationships with some objects last, while others are superseded by the latest model? Why do we discard

functioning products? These are important questions at a time when our appetite for the new is producing ever-increasing mountains of waste. Like Frankenstein's monster, these creations of ours are both frightening and pathetic. They are victims of expired empathy, out-dated status symbols discarded by the ruthless march of aspiration. Yet in their silent ranks they present a challenge to our whole way of life.

Read Jonathan Chapman's essay, Desire, Disappointment and Domestic Waste (PDF), written for the Pavilion Commissions 2007.