It’s just over a week since our celebration event at the University of Glasgow’s School of Education, marking the exhibition of visual and sculptural Waste Stories produced by students at New College Lanarkshire.

The artworks included in the exhibition explored waste from a variety of perspectives. This is the first post of a series of three that will focus in on important themes that the student-artists developed.

Several visual Waste Stories referenced addiction and addictive consumption. Three in particular referred to nicotine, whether delivered through cigarettes or their 21^st century replacement, vapes. The first of these was actually produced outside of the project itself, by longstanding and extremely talented Art Club member Bill Clark. The two pieces Bill chose to include in the exhibition told stories of marine litter. However, he also made The ‘Litter’ Story of a Cigarette Packet.

This mixed-media piece uses silhouette people made out of empty beer cans to describe the serial littering associated with smoking. As Bill describes it,

1. On purchasing the ‘cigarettes’, off comes the cellophane wrap and drops it on the ground.
2. On removing the ‘foil’ from the packet, it gets dropped on the ground.
3. On removing a ‘cigarette’, out comes the ‘matches’ to light it.  This time it is the ‘match’ that is dropped on the ground.
4. Finishing smoking all the ‘cigarettes’, this time it is the empty packet that is thrown to the ground.

How many times a day does this happen on our streets?

A little ‘cigarette’ makes a lot of mess!

The second piece we include here also addresses the problem of cigarette butts. Scorpius McCracken, who was enrolled in a Level 3/4 art class at the time of the project, created a painting that at first glance seems perfectly innocent and natural – an adult bird feeding its fledgeling offspring.

But look a little closer and you’ll realise that the picture-book image, with its brilliant blues and earthy greens and browns, shows something much darker. It isn’t a worm that the young bird is hungrily waiting for – instead, the adult’s beak holds a discarded dowt or cigarette butt.

This visual story of an unintentionally toxic relationship is firmly based in reality. In 2022, Swedish firm Corvid Cleaning “recruited” wild crows as “partners” to help clean up city streets by teaching them to forage for cigarette butts that they could exchange for (literally) peanuts. Here at Waste Stories, we can’t say we’re entirely enthusiastic about using birds – no matter how intelligent – to solve the global problem caused by the billions of cigarette ends that are discarded every year.

The final piece we’re featuring in this post comes from Dylan Giblin. Dylan worked on a sequence of related pieces for his Level 6 course making sculpture with found objects. He used the opportunity to explore the theme of vapes – the tobacco-free, battery-operated nicotine delivery systems that appeal to children far more than cigarettes ever did.

Dylan constructed a pair of lungs, fed by an airway made up of the plastic cases that surround Crystal vapes and that can be picked up on streets all over the UK. The pitted surface of the lungs themselves is dotted with squares of metal that once covered the ends of the vapes. This work thus leads the viewer from the external waste-as-litter and toxic pollutant to the internal damage that addiction to vaping will ultimately cause.