This was a 'Year of The Artist' project sponsored by the Arts Council England, Collins Skiphire and Suffolk Wildlife Trust in 2000/2001

Mobile Art entailed a month residency at a landfill site and skip company in Suffolk.

I was interested and very concerned about the amount of familiar domestic items that were discarded and had no more use. I wanted to highlight this problem of disposal and our 'throwaway' society. Most of us unaware and disinterested in how they ended their life filling up space and creating volume and gas underneath our fragile earth. I selected 20 items and created shadows in colourful images on both sides of skips and painted the items themselves white to create their 'ghost'.  The skips were then re-instated back into commercial circulation. During the exhibition these ghosted objects were re-installed around the exhibition space.

The skips were driven in a line over the Orwell Bridge in Suffolk (a familiar feature for all Suffolk travellers) by a police escort. This created a TV news item, and a dialogue within the local community as to the problems we were creating by our thoughtless manufacturing of short term objects.

For more information about these pieces contact Ruth via email ruthrichmond@me.com or @ruthrichmond66

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