Every piece of plastic you have ever used in your life still exists. That piece of cling wrap that your Mum wrapped your assorted creams in before placing them in your (plastic) lunchbox; that yoghurt tub you bought in the second week of October 2001; the garbage bag currently lining your bin, slowly being filled with plastic from your packaged fruit and vegetables. You don’t see it, but it is all still out there. Try to imagine the space your lifetime’s waste occupies in landfill.  Worse still, imagine it piled on your back lawn.

According to Greenpeace, on average each Australian produces 1.5 tonnes of waste per year – most of it avoidable. Waste for the sake of convenience is threatening to strangle us, like a plastic ring from a milk bottle around a sea birds neck!

‘Anthropocene Me’ is an exploration of waste in our modern era. The epoch of the Anthropocene is defined by the impact that humans have had on the Earths geology and ecosystems and is commonly thought to have commenced from the Industrial Revolution.  If the Earth survives the Anthropocene, future generations may one day unearth our waste (just as we have unearthed ancient civilisations) and wonder what led us to impact the planet as we have.

The aim of these drawings is to ask why.  It is to ask you to think about how you consume goods every day that create waste for the sake of waste, and to ask you to think about changing, at least just a little bit.  In highlighting the absurdity of waste in our current age, I hope that we can somehow stem its exponential growth.  Because nobody but ourselves can save us from ourselves.