Second Skin / Second Life. Artist Statement (Mass) Antony Clarkson 2026
The act of wrapping has been present in my sculptural practice since my earliest engagement with the genre. In Second Skin / Second Life, however, it assumes a renewed conceptual urgency. The transformation of waste into form is not merely aesthetic but ideological, foregrounding questions of consumerism, profit, and material afterlife. Here, the home itself emerges as a layered protective shell, echoed through the repeated presence of packaging, containment, and concealment. Wrapping becomes both a physical process and a metaphor for the systems through which waste is displaced, obscured, and rendered socially invisible.
The found objects employed are exclusively discarded packaging: traces and residues of family life that function as material evidence of household routine. These remnants of consumption once circulated quietly through intimate routines of domestic labour: sorting, recycling, cleaning, and disposal, performed as everyday gestures of environmental responsibility. Recent shifts in recycling policy, however, have disrupted these ethical routines. Materials once carefully sorted within the home now enter opaque global waste streams whose final destinations remain uncertain. Rather than re-entering cycles of reuse, many are increasingly likely to contribute to landfill accumulation, exported waste systems, and wider forms of environmental degradation.
Their redeployment within sculpture functions not only as material reuse but as a critical intervention into systems of consumption and disposal, recontextualising waste as both aesthetic form and cultural evidence. Through accumulation, binding, and containment, discarded materials acquire renewed physical and symbolic weight within sculpture, resisting the cultural impulse toward disappearance and disposal. Their preservation within the work does not erase their implication within wider systems of consumption and waste but instead renders those entanglements newly visible. In this sense, the works preserve traces of domestic life while exposing the fragile boundary between the intimacy of the household and the scale of planetary ecological consequence.
The work therefore positions the home not as isolated from ecological crisis, but as involuntarily entangled within wider systems of production, policy, and waste circulation. The home, often imagined as a site of sanctuary and care, becomes an unwilling participant in forms of ecological harm that extend far beyond the boundaries of the household. Ultimately, the work exposes how private acts of environmental care remain vulnerable to unstable and increasingly opaque global infrastructures.
The act of wrapping has been present in my sculptural practice since my earliest engagement with the genre. In Second Skin / Second Life, however, it assumes a renewed conceptual urgency. The transformation of waste into form is not merely aesthetic but ideological, foregrounding questions of consumerism, profit, and material afterlife. Here, the home itself emerges as a layered protective shell, echoed through the repeated presence of packaging, containment, and concealment. Wrapping becomes both a physical process and a metaphor for the systems through which waste is displaced, obscured, and rendered socially invisible.
The found objects employed are exclusively discarded packaging: traces and residues of family life that function as material evidence of household routine. These remnants of consumption once circulated quietly through intimate routines of domestic labour: sorting, recycling, cleaning, and disposal, performed as everyday gestures of environmental responsibility. Recent shifts in recycling policy, however, have disrupted these ethical routines. Materials once carefully sorted within the home now enter opaque global waste streams whose final destinations remain uncertain. Rather than re-entering cycles of reuse, many are increasingly likely to contribute to landfill accumulation, exported waste systems, and wider forms of environmental degradation.
Their redeployment within sculpture functions not only as material reuse but as a critical intervention into systems of consumption and disposal, recontextualising waste as both aesthetic form and cultural evidence. Through accumulation, binding, and containment, discarded materials acquire renewed physical and symbolic weight within sculpture, resisting the cultural impulse toward disappearance and disposal. Their preservation within the work does not erase their implication within wider systems of consumption and waste but instead renders those entanglements newly visible. In this sense, the works preserve traces of domestic life while exposing the fragile boundary between the intimacy of the household and the scale of planetary ecological consequence.
The work therefore positions the home not as isolated from ecological crisis, but as involuntarily entangled within wider systems of production, policy, and waste circulation. The home, often imagined as a site of sanctuary and care, becomes an unwilling participant in forms of ecological harm that extend far beyond the boundaries of the household. Ultimately, the work exposes how private acts of environmental care remain vulnerable to unstable and increasingly opaque global infrastructures.
