Susannah Bryant
Currently a senior at Wofford College, Susannah Bryant is majoring in English and Environmental Studies. Though her majors have not afforded her much time to create her own art in the past, Bryant discovered a way to incorporate her love for the visual arts into her studies by choosing to focus her Environmental Studies senior capstone project on Ecological Art in the state of South Carolina. While the main component of this project was to discover more about the Ecological Art movement as a whole and then focus on finding and interviewing artists within the boundaries of the state who fall into that genre, Bryant decided to add another component wherein she would make her own contribution to the body of South Carolina Eco Art.
Bryant had a good understanding of the many, many environmental problems the world was facing (and continues to face) due to three years of environmental studies classes, but she wanted to choose and issue that could be easily related to her life and the lives of people in her community. Believing that many people view environmental problems as issues that they have little control over or little personal effect on, she decided to research the waste disposal and recycling practices and efficiency in Spartanburg, South Carolina so that she might remind people that their waste has a life after the
trash can and that they most likely produce much more individual waste than they think.
Bryant found a very helpful source for her research in the South Carolina DHEC Recycling and Waste Management portfolios, which are accessible online to the public. This compilation of statistics provided a wonderful knowledge base as it presented the average amount waste produced per person per annum, the average amount recycled, and the cost benefits and downfalls for both recycling and landfill disposal among many other facts. Bryant also visited the Spartanburg County’s public landfill, Wellford Landfill, which is located in Wellford, South Carolina. Upon receiving a guided car tour of the landfill (for which Bryant’s nose will be forever grateful), Bryant was able to gain a much more thorough understanding of the life of waste beyond the dumpster. Bryant was allowed to photograph the landfill while visiting, and she decided to use some of those photographs in her personal art contribution.
For that contribution, Bryant conceived the idea of combining charcoal drawing with the landfill photographs. A layer of charcoal would be coated over a faded printed photograph, then Bryant would use an eraser to remove some of the charcoal, revealing the landfill image and lighter portions of the paper in doing so. The images for the drawings (a girl walking down a path carrying several shopping bags and a close-up of a hand holding a plastic grocery bag) were chosen to emphasize the rampant consumerism of 1st World Society, and the images of landfill waste were revealed within these erased images to remind viewers of the influence each purchase and disposed of item has on the environment.
While remaining within the focus of consumption and waste, Bryant also conducted a small study of one person’s daily waste during the duration of one week. Bryant asked her mother to set aside her trash every day for one week instead of disposing of it. Bryant then photographed each day’s garbage individually and then she photographed the trash from the entire week all together. Next, taking seven small paper shopping bags and one large one, she cut out her mother’s profile on each bag and inserted a one photograph to fill each profile. Despite the fact that it was not even her own trash, Bryant found it quite eye-opening to take the time and look at everything thrown away in a single week. She hopes to continue this project with other people and on a longer time scale to make the her point of individual influence on waste more emphatic.