Illuminated trash: Creative workshop

Join Louise and Laura for a scavenger walk through and around Queen Elizabeth Park, where we will search for overlooked materials (trash and weeds) along the canal. Using the “scavenger coat” as a tool for collective gathering, we will look for new meanings in discarded objects and transform them into unexpected, surreal assemblages that blur the boundaries between waste and nature.

Back in the community classroom, we will use what we have collected through guided live writing and collage-based exercises. Drawing on surrealist collage and experimental writing practices, the workshop frames landfill and waste as dynamic, ever-changing sites akin to a cut-up poem in which matter and meaning continually shift.

We will then transform our trash into storied lumen prints using sunlight and plant matter.

Bring a camera or a smart phone for taking photos.

No prior experience is needed - just curiosity, openness, and a willingness to see the familiar in new ways.

Part of the Canvas project.

Age 16+

About the artists

Laura Copsey is a London-based artist and arts educator. With a background in occupational therapy, illustration and music, she creates interdisciplinary and collaborative works, live experiences, expeditions and socially engaged projects. Laura's practice is inspired by heritage, geo-poetics and hydrofiction, often in relation to particular places or bodies of water.

Louise Ashcroft's performances, comedy, videos, writing, community projects, drawings, games and sculptures spawn from their optimistic but antagonistic fieldwork in public space; meddling with the bizarre norms of capitalism and reinventing what's possible. ​Speaking fantasy to power, Louise's work creates situations and stories which unravel reality and remix primary and secondary research; often deliberately misunderstanding or subverting cultural codes and disrupting systems in order to speculate alternative ways of seeing/being.