A modern neologism (a newly coined word) using classical linguistic building blocks to create a formal institutional title for a repository of waste the Refusarium is a project that has evolved as an iteration of a  project I developed during my MFA at OCAD University entitled the UMBRARIUM in which I located, collected, documented, studied and presented shadows of fast fashion to allude to how objects and their materials cast long-lasting shadows on the Land.

 

Deeply rooted in my UN/making Methodology and grounded in the critique of the ARThropocene – that being the mass reproduction, excess materiality, waste production and global display of the visual arts. As such, this project embraces maintenance art and walking as a decolonial method to acknowledge how “all Art is Land Art” (Price) as it from the earth all materials come, travel across and eventually return.

 

Begun in 2024 as a result of attending a walking residency on Toronto Island entitled Walking by the Wayside under the tutelage of Sarah Cullen and Simon Pope, this museological project is an extension of the Wht-trSH installation first shown at the MacLaren Art Centre in 2025 that went on to grow and exhibit at the Art Gallery of Mississauga. Having now cleaned over 35 different beaches, the project, an act of deep listening, honours how the objects gathered are not merely environmental casualties, nor dead matter, but active participants in a complex, shared geography.

 

By turning my attention to the anthropogenic litter recovered from local shorelines, I step into a space of profound empathy for the bodies of Water that carried these materials and the shores that finally held them. As such, every specimen within these vitrines has lived an extraordinary second life. Once discarded by human hands, these items were claimed by the current or warmed by the sand upon which they were left behind.