LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
ENTANGLED BEINGS: A REFLECTION ON MAKING ART ASSEMBLAGES FROM WASTE MATERIALS
ENTANGLED
BEINGS: A
REFLECTION ON
MAKING ART
ASSEMBLAGES
FROM WASTE
MATERIALS
Oonagh E. Fitzgerald*
Fecha de recepción: 23 de agosto de 2023 Fecha de aceptación: 11 de marzo de 2024
145 145/
OONAGH E. FITZGERALD
SERES
ENREDADOS: UNA
REFLEXIÓN SOBRE
LA CREACIÓN
DE MONTAJES
DE ARTE CON
MATERIALES
DE DESECHO
*Doctor of Juridical Science, University of Toronto.
President of the International law Association of Canada.
Senior Fellow at the Human Rights Research and Education
Centre, University of Ottawa, Canada.
ofitzgerald@rogers.com
https://orcid.org/0009-0004-3684-8190
Sugerencia de citación: Fitzgerald, Oonagh E. Entangled Beings: A Reflection on Making Art Assemblages from Waste Materials.
La Tadeo DeArte 9, n.°12,2023: 1-22. https://doi.org/10.21789/24223158.2107
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
ENTANGLED BEINGS: A REFLECTION ON MAKING ART ASSEMBLAGES FROM WASTE MATERIALSENTANGLED BEINGS: A REFLECTION ON MAKING ART ASSEMBLAGES FROM WASTE MATERIALS
This paper reflects on making visual art works with
everyday waste material found in the garbage heaps of
the postmodern cyborg Anthropocene. My reflection,
shaped by earlier material explorations of creating
assemblages from discarded or decaying materials,
focuses mainly on the challenge of making a semi-per-
manent art assemblage titled Amazonia, Goddess of
Waste. The methodologies I followed for this reflection
are autoethnography and interdisciplinary art-inter-
national law research creation. My outlook has been
influenced by art movements such as new materialism,
postmodernism, and posthumanism. The meditations
that I included in this document – related to interna-
tional law’s failure to protect human rights and the
environment and the opportunities and challenges of
artmaking in times of environmental crisis – were pro-
duced as I struggled with the materiality of Amazonia’s
paradoxical fragility.
ABSTRACT
Keywords:
making visual;
art; art assemblage;
autoethnography.
>>>>>>
147 147/
OONAGH E. FITZGERALD
RESUMEN
Este artículo reflexiona sobre la realización de obras de
arte visual con materiales de desecho cotidianos en-
contrados en los montones de basura del Antropoceno
cyborg posmoderno. Mi reflexión, formada por ex-
ploraciones materiales anteriores sobre la creación de
ensamblajes a partir de materiales desechados o en de-
scomposición, se centra en el desafío de hacer un ens-
amblaje artístico semipermanente titulado Amazonia,
Goddess of Waste. Las metodologías que seguí para esta
reflexión son la autoetnografía y la creación de arte in-
terdisciplinario/investigación del derecho internacion-
al. Mi perspectiva ha sido influenciada por movimientos
artísticos como el nuevo materialismo, el posmodernis-
mo y el poshumanismo. Las meditaciones que incluí en
este documento –relacionadas con el fracaso del dere-
cho internacional para proteger los derechos humanos
y el medio ambiente y las oportunidades y desafíos de
la creación artística en tiempos de crisis ambiental–
fueron producidas mientras luchaba con la materiali-
dad de la paradójica fragilidad de Amazonia.
Palabras clave:
hacer visual;
arte; ensamblaje de
arte; autoetnografía.
>>>>>>
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
ENTANGLED BEINGS: A REFLECTION ON MAKING ART ASSEMBLAGES FROM WASTE MATERIALS
T visual art works with everyday waste ma-
terial found in the garbage heaps of the postmodern cyborg Anthropocene.
My reflection, shaped by earlier material explorations of creating assemblag-
es from discarded or decaying materials, focuses mainly on the challenge of
making a semi-permanent art assemblage titled Amazonia, Goddess of Waste.
The methodologies I followed for this reflection are autoethnography and
interdisciplinary art-international law research creation. My outlook has been
influenced by art movements such as new materialism, postmodernism, and
posthumanism. The meditations that I included in this document – related
to international law’s failure to protect human rights and the environment
and the opportunities and challenges of artmaking in times of environmen-
tal crisis – were produced as I struggled with the materiality of Amazonia’s
paradoxical fragility.
INTRODUCTION
149 149/
OONAGH E. FITZGERALD
M is based on revealing how
international law and governance have failed to protect human rights and
the environment. My aim is to imagine solutions to those issues beyond the
bounds of legal reasoning. For this, I use research-creation and autoethno-
graphic research11 methodologies within my interdisciplinary international
law-art practice of making objects from waste materials. In this sense, I recall
Graeme Sullivan when he states that art does not change things but changes
people who can change things and that imagination is the place of possibili-
ty.2 He writes, “The promise of change that comes from wonder takes shape
in the things we create, through what we make and experience, or from what
we come to see and know through the experience of someone else. Visual
arts not only are an aesthetic process of self-realization but also a research
process of turning questions into more questions.3 That is why, through
artmaking, I seek to tap into the possibilities of reimagining my relationship
with waste materials.
Research-creation and autoethnography, additionally, allow me to chal-
lenge myself to be aware and explicit about the multiple dimensions of think-
ing and doing, and to be “in flow”, curious, open, and active, absorbing into
the whole aspects that are intentional, accidental, conscious, unconscious,
and subconscious. Through playing with materials, making, and reflecting on
my artistic practice I connect through space and time with real and imagined
stories.4 I imagine using waste materials (plastic and cardboard) to construct
a being.
METHODOLOGY
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
ENTANGLED BEINGS: A REFLECTION ON MAKING ART ASSEMBLAGES FROM WASTE MATERIALS
T artmaking I seek to critique, decode, and
reimagine a new type of international law and governance, which might be better suited for our
times. In conducting my interdisciplinary international law-art research creation I have been
inspired by Karen Barad’s idea of refractive reading, which acknowledges each reader will take
something dierent from a text and one should read glancingly, to see whether interesting refrac-
tions emerge.5 Adopting this approach in reading diicult philosophical texts has allowed me to
engage with them subjectively, based on my legal knowledge, art making, performance practice,
life experience, and resistance to sexism, racism, colonialism and neo-colonial capitalism. Such
an approach obviates the need to try to “know” what authors meant and allows me to glean ideas
and inspiration useful to my project.
Gerry Simpson describes the buttoned up and serious, “austere modernism” of international
law.6 Lawyers learn to write in “deracinated, depersonalised, formally circumscribed, view-from-
nowhere prose” following the understanding that physical and psychological separation from the
subject matter marks the lawful human being.7 This means that many important issues and emo-
tions are not readily expressible in legal practice and that the language of law may even prevent
their expression. Hilary Charlesworth and Emma Larking suggest that to deconstruct law and
understand how it works, it is useful to look at it from a perverse perspective. Instead of focus-
ing on what environmental and human rights protections international law provides, “We could
begin from the opposite end and examine what international law has to oer to the person who
wants to pollute the environment or violate human rights.”8 Anna Grear goes further, arguing that
the “Anthropocene (and its climate crisis) represents a crisis of human hierarchy.” She discerns
“dense continuities … between the Anthropocene… and the patterned imposition of hierar-
chies operative within the ‘anthropocentrism’ of law.”9 She reviews the hierarchies of ‘feminized
others’, based on gender, race, indigeneity, etc., constructed in line with the Cartesian world
view, and how law enacts disembodied legal personhood and objectifies the ‘natural world’.10
Like Charlesworth and Larking, Grear asks us to consider who is “we” in the Anthropocene and
whether international law protects “us”.11
American philosopher Martha Nussbaum also addresses the issue of whom international
law protects and identifies deep flaws in the cosmopolitan tradition upon which it is founded.
She notes that while cosmopolitanism appears to impose stringent duties of respect for intrinsic
human dignity,12 it does not include duties of material aid, thus overlooking the glaring fact that
material inequality diminishes human life.13 She finds that international law’s foundation lies in
toxically masculine stoic and cosmopolitan ideals of self-suiciency.14 Thus, the citizen of the
world in whose image international law has been constructed is a Western, white male stoic, or
(as Grear suggests) a corporation, which leaves unrepresented and unprotected many human and
other living beings who need help from those around them to protect and nurture their dignity.
Existing international law and governance thus oer little comfort as contemporary human
beings are challenged to survive and thrive in the face of multiple risks and crises: human-in-
duced climate change, mass species extinction,15 conventional or nuclear war,16 pandemics,
colonial legacy, and economic and gender inequality. International law’s failure to address the
materiality of planetary existence calls for radical approaches17 to decode and reimagine law.
Built on imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and power politics,18 international law has been
INFLUENCES
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OONAGH E. FITZGERALD
slow to absorb ideas circulating in literature, art, and philosophy. Interdisciplinary art-interna-
tional law research creation, on the other hand, is fueled by ideas such as gender critique, new
materialism, postmodernism and posthumanism.
When Hélène Cixous, writes: “Now, I-woman am going to blow up the Law: an explosion
henceforth possible and ineluctable; let it be done, right now, in language”, she challenges wom-
en to invent their own language and enact their own laws.19 Rosi Braidotti also invites women to
explore the feminist materiality of situated and embodied knowledge.20 Posthumanism disman-
tles the nature\culture dichotomy, and situates humans as entangled with their environment, as-
suming “agency is distributed through dynamic forces of which the human participates but does
not completely intend or control.”21 Jane Bennett encourages “more intelligent and sustainable
engagements with vibrant matter and lively things.”22 Karan Barad deconstructs anthropocen-
trism with posthumanist agential realism, airming an approach to ethics and justice grounded
in matter and materiality.23 Donna Haraway invokes cyborg imagery to suggest “a way out of the
maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” creating an
imaginative opening both to build and destroy “machines, identities, categories, relationships,
space stories.”24
The convergence of posthuman critical thinking and new materialism provides me, as a
visual artist, with inspiration for making attuned to vibrant, agential matter. It oers me, as an
international lawyer, powerful tools with which to critique and reimagine legal orders. It calls for
embodied thinking about law and artmaking,25 oering guidance to my interdisciplinary research
creation. My plastic waste artmaking is a practice and a meditation about international law’s
failure to address the environmental and human rights issues we are facing. Autoethnography
allows me to document the personal, postmodern, posthuman, embodied, material experience
of artmaking and interdisciplinary art-international law research creation with plastic waste.
Deleuze and Guattari provide evocative and inspiring ideas to help work through the research
creation synthesis of the domains of art and international law. They explore the question of why
people accept servitude, pointing out that philosophy (logos), like law (legis), serves to wrap
justification, legitimacy and authority around the apparatus of domination, whether State or in-
ternational order.26 The question as to why and on what conditions we accept servitude, is central
to my goal of using art and performance to decode and reimagine international law by helping
us to focus on what we value most. Deleuze and Guattari describe “lines of flight” as movements
that can disrupt the established order: “It is on lines of flight that new weapons are invented, to be
turned against the heavy arms of the State”.27 Disruptive decoding and deterritorializing lines of
flight are associated with what they call the “war machine”.28 They portray a bleak picture of no-
madic war machines captured and appropriated by State and World institutions as State or World
war machines continue war by political means and whose objective is “a peace still more terrify-
ing than fascist death”.29 The authors oer a ray of hope in their discouraging picture: an “artistic
movement can be a potential war machine...”30 This is because ideological, scientific or artistic
movements “make war only on the condition that they simultaneously create something else”.31 I
am inspired to imagine that interdisciplinary art-international law research creation could provide
lines of flight for an artistic war machine whose object is not war but to confront and illuminate our
servitude to rules that do not help us or our planet and to imagine and create something better.
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
ENTANGLED BEINGS: A REFLECTION ON MAKING ART ASSEMBLAGES FROM WASTE MATERIALS
M been moved to make
art from everyday, found and waste objects, seeking to
redefine or reimagine their relations with these objects
and materials.32 We observe the material in its environ-
ment of discard – recycling or garbage bins, a ditch at
the side of the road, a river’s edge, the beach –, extract
it as a resource for art production and import it into a
world of imagination, decoding, recodification, redef-
inition and resignification. We give these monstrous
materials new life, wings, power as media of expression
for themselves and the artists who handle them. The re-
sults can be silly, messy, ironic, beautiful, and terrifying.
Awareness of the performativity33 of artmaking is
acute when trying to make art from waste materials.
Despite their industrial sophistication there is little
guidance for how to work with them and the creative
eort can readily devolve into absurdity. Self-conscious
performativity is evident in gathering, cleaning, touch-
ing, arranging, cutting, assembling, mounting, and
displaying waste plastic artwork. The formed mate-
rials resist and mock attempts to reshape them, glue
them, tame them. They have their own mysterious and
dangerous ways of interacting with our bodies and the
environment. They force us to confront our own en-
tanglement with and embodied responsibility34 for the
burgeoning piles of plastic waste. Besides the material
challenges of handling plastic waste, the process can be
emotional, engendering feelings of hypocrisy, futility,
desperation, triviality, and frustration.
I have explored working with waste materials
and socially engaged art for a few years: learning
about slow design and urban design consistent with
the Sustainable Development Goals;35 making an
International law conference lanyard tutu (Fig. 1) assem-
blage from waste material accumulated in my work
travels; using waste paper for Spring-zining to the curb
and beyond to make zines for people in the neighbour-
hood to complete; using found pieces of birch bark,
waste paper and old house paint to create Jeanne b’Arc,
heroine for the Anthropocene (Fig. 2); using packing card-
board to make Gorgon of Waste (Fig. 3); using packing
waste and fabric remnants to make Handle with Care:
Values in our Hearts (Fig. 4), and Cape of Tattered Hearts.
(Fig. 5). My latest assemblage was Amazonia Goddess of
Waste, made of packing materials and fabric remnants,
and I had started preparations for my next plastic proj-
ect made from a water trampoline found discarded by
the side of the road.
Connection with the environment is fundamental
to my work. Working with waste materials provokes a
revery about how the international legal system has
enabled the spread of plastic and other polluting waste
and has only taken small, belated, steps to address
the resulting environmental destruction. Landfills,
rivers, and oceans are overflowing with plastic waste.
Recycling serves to alleviate our sense of responsibility
by allowing us to dispose of our plastic waste, even
though we know the programs are far from perfect.
Contemplating my household environmental footprint,
I gathered waste materials and wondered if I could turn
them into artwork. I took photographs of inside-out
cleaned waste food packaging and posted them on
Instagram, wondering whether they could be used
to create an art project (Fig. 6). Amazonia: Goddess
of Waste, made of cardboard, plastic and foil (waste
packing materials), started to take shape in the form of
a youthful pregnant women (Fig. 7) covered in silvery
plastic leaves.
Cleaning and cutting the material was not challeng-
ing, but it was frustrating trying to find means to stick
the leaves onto the body. While dissolution and decay
is always on my mind as I work with waste materials, it
became a particular challenge to figure out how to keep
this heap of garbage out of the dump by making it into
a reasonably permanent assemblage, especially as I did
not want to add to environmental problems by using
toxic glues.
I have experienced impermanence when working
with birchbark, picking up the pieces in the woods,
shaking out the disintegrating core, scrubbing away
the trails of insects and strands of mycelium, banishing
giant spiders. The material and lively natural decay was
thrilling. Garbage, plastic waste, on the other hand,
presented as a burden, a problem of our own creating
ARTMAKING
WITH WASTE
153 153/
OONAGH E. FITZGERALD
for which we must take responsibility. Making art from
it was a way to think about that responsibility and learn
how to use waste productively.
While my art projects have little impact on the flow
of waste to landfills and will not solve the global prob-
lem of plastic waste, they make work for me, providing
a time-consuming, oen frustrating meditation on the
mess we create: how we need to reuse, consume less,
clean up, take responsibility for the garbage we pur-
chase, use briefly, then discard. If we all took the time to
try to make things with our garbage maybe, we would
have less time to consume and create waste. Some
may consider it a waste of energy to try to transform
garbage into art and a display of privilege in that I have
the time and resources playfully to explore interdisci-
plinary research creation projects when others must
scavenge garbage simply to survive. Being a socially
engaged visual artist\lawyer and not a scientist, my
imperfect solution to waste is to try to consume less
and use waste to make an artistic statement, something
beautiful, humorous, provocative, shocking, that gets
others to engage with their own plastic waste.
Trying to make art with plastic waste, I have
learned how to use these materials for positive ends,
but also that they are not ideal, and that we must pro-
duce and use less of them. I could not see myself buying
a block of marble or a ton of clay, wood, steel, or alumi-
num to make my art because I am surrounded by waste
material that needs to be repurposed and understood
as material in this world. With broken supply chains, in
which purchase is the end and no thought is given to
the many aerlives of used, broken and discarded ob-
jects, I am surrounded by endless materials for artmak-
ing. There is no other place where garbage disappears,
it is with us, and in us.
I try to imagine a more circular economy where
people reduce, recycle, reuse, and in which the environ-
ment, humans, and the economy flourish and harmo-
niously balance. I imagine artisanal mining of waste
materials of the postmodern posthuman world becom-
ing a subversive goldrush, with garbage being trans-
formed into something precious. For me plastic waste
is precious, an endless source of free of charge material
that can be used to make art reflect on environmental
issues. However, its properties are dangerous, de-
structive, and not well understood or safely regulated.
Endless mountains of unrecycled plastic waste doc-
ument our disordered, greedy and thoughtless lives
and contribute to the shameful geological record of
the Anthropocene. If artmaking helps draw attention
to the problem of plastic pollution, it may spur social
and political action in favor of safer, more transparent
management, production, use, and recycling of plastic,
and it may help develop a more sustainable and circular
economy.
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
ENTANGLED BEINGS: A REFLECTION ON MAKING ART ASSEMBLAGES FROM WASTE MATERIALS
AMAZONIA’S JOURNEY
G A in an art exhibition in Montreal I worried, would she survive
travel from Ottawa? Would she disintegrate en-route or in a sudden gust of wind as we carried
her from the car to the exhibition space? She survived the trip, and my son helped me install her
hanging from a rotating device taped to one of the ceiling bars in the exhibition space. I still mar-
vel at how for two weeks she hung firmly, rotating slowly, never losing a silvery leaf (Fig. 8). This
was my artistic statement about her:
Haste makes waste. Bezos and his empire delivering to our doors, each parcel more urgent
and important, perfectly packaged, padded in plastic, paper, and cardboard. Delivery
drivers hurry blindly from destination to destination, themselves driven by algorithms and
data input, fulfilling our decadent dreams. They see nobody, no neighbourhood, nothing
local. Leaves grow, leaves fall, what is our future? Hope filled with horror: microplastics and
macroplastics awash in our oceans and in all our beings and those yet to become. Littering,
flaking, enduring, permeating all our bodies, what are we delivering to this earth?
When the show ended, Amazonia waited on her stretcher at the curb. Under a grey sheet her
youthful pregnant form looked tragic, apparently deceased, causing passersby to stop and gasp
until I reassured them that she was not real. When I tried to hang her at home, a month later,
there was another moment of tragedy as I realized she was disintegrating.
Aer weeks of summer distractions, I started writing reflections and repairing this garbage
sculpture. While I admired her form, I saw her weaknesses and vulnerabilities, as limbs kept sep-
arating and layers kept peeling o, falling, driing downward. She was constantly in the process
of falling apart and required repeated fixing because nothing sticks well to plastic waste. Aer a
series of repairs, I got ready to hoist her again with little confidence that she was stable. Would
her arm hold, would her hand hold, would her elbows hold? I considered whether the project was
about this instability, whether I should view her as a performance piece about futility and entro-
py, and find a suitable way to record her dissolution, perhaps through time lapse photography
over weeks, days, or hours, but I continued to resist.
I worked to rebuild and reinforce her and, struggling with the suspending strings, I got
her alo and positioned. I walked away briefly to read again about glues for plastic and when I
passed by her, she was already listing, one of her suspending strings having come loose again. So,
death to duct tape and white glue: neither work. White glue’s hold is ethereal and fleeting, and if
knocked it detaches entirely leaving a clear web of dried, impotent glue. Duct tape applied on the
frame to hold the suspending strings and in tightly rolled narrow strips is surprisingly unserious
about sticking to itself or to plastic. The myth of its omni utility sadly has been disproven. I took
her down and laid her on the IKEA cardboard stretcher Karl originally made for transporting
Jeanne b’Arc. She looked stable on that, using the floor piece as a kind of halo around her head.
Maybe I could get some proper glue and rebuild her on the stretcher and use that to hold her rath-
er than the strings? Either that or I could take an axe to her and put her out for garbage pickup …
Karl was protesting but I was fed up.
I expanded the dining table, covered it in newspaper and laid her there. She clearly needed
more work. Having read about all the amazing plastic glues on the market I was not further ahead
155 155/
OONAGH E. FITZGERALD
as they all seemed toxic and inappropriate for the kind of plastic waste with which I was working.
Rummaging through my tool bag, I encountered a ball of artist gum wrapped in a plastic bag,
the residue of all the gum used in our show in Montreal to hang photos and prints on the gallery
walls. I read the packaging label on another unopened pack of the gum, thinking it might work
better than white glue and duct tape. I also looked again at mod podge, favored for collage – was
this not a collage? This made me think about adding scraps of fabric and in my remnants drawer I
found the hems I had cut o my son’s curtains. They were a plain abstract jacquard in grey beige
with cream lines. I started cutting leaf shapes out of this fabric and slowly revisited every inch
of Amazonia’s feet and legs, using the gum to replace ineective glue and duct tape. When I had
done a section, I applied mod podge. I continued this way up the whole of the front of the figure
as she lay on her back on the table. Once the mod podge was cured, I turned her over and repeat-
ed the process on the back. Meanwhile I was wracking my brains on how to display her vertically
when every part of her body was weak and susceptible to breaking apart, even with the new gum
and podge. If the stretcher was the solution, I wondered, why fix her backside and ought I to focus
instead on making the stretcher interesting?
We were filling yard bags with the leaves and branches from a sick tree that Karl had cut
down, when he pulled a strand of strangling vine that had been chopped down earlier through the
fence, unspooling a long trail of dried leaves and tendrils. I was about to roll it up and throw it in
the bag but was suddenly struck by the thought that it might be a perfect way to wrap Amazonia
to hold her together and distribute her weight away from her weakest parts. I found rolled up
picture-hanging wires le over from previous exhibitions and wrapped that around the strands of
vine, removing the dried leaves but retaining the curly tendrils. I wrapped jute string around the
vine for added resilience and flexibility. So far it looked good, and I was excited to learn how to
apply it to Amazonia, to hold her in multiple places, to keep her firm and stable. That would have
to wait until aer her backside had been repaired and adjusted with the artist gum, mod podge,
material leaves and additional plastic and foil leaves accumulated in the last few days (Fig. 9).
I love the flash of realization when a material object reveals its possibilities. I had been
talking to a former colleague who had used the word “entanglements” to describe various pro-
fessional and social commitments that kept him occupied and feeling vital. It was an evocative
word, suggesting the risk of strangulation and entrapment as well as the possibility of delight
from sensual and intellectual engagement. Rather than having Amazonia simply hanging from her
ribs or turning suspended, entanglement with the natural vines, wires, and string might convey
additional dimensions of our relationships with plastics and waste.
I applied mod podge to the entwined vine, wire, and jute. I bent the thickest stem of the vine
into a hook and tied it. Noticing how it adjusted to the new shape, I tightened it again. I tried the
vines on my body and then went for a walk puzzling over how best to apply them to the figure to
distribute and support her weight. When I returned, I wrapped Amazonia in the vines, got the step
ladder and suspended her from a metal loop in the ceiling. She held overnight but detecting some
strain on her chest, I adjusted her again. Despite my struggle to make her permanent, Amazonia
remained waywardly fragile (Fig. 10).
The vine as the only natural element in the artwork, encircling and suspending the female
form of shiny plastic packaging leaves, provided material and visual contrast, posing questions
about our relations with nature. She was lovely but also horrible. My artist son responded to a
photo of her by sending me a photo of an old print of a hanged trussed sailor. It hit home – this
was not a pretty sight. Amazonia was certainly provocative and readily conveyed horror, conjur-
ing sexual violence, subjugation, imprisonment, torture, death. I was relieved that I had resisted
the temptation to show her to our neighbours’ children in my flush of excitement at finishing this
latest version. I wondered whether perhaps it would be best only to show her occasionally rather
than have her hang permanently. Weirdly, this struggle to make Amazonia physically more robust
had made her less tolerable as an art piece, more unbearable.
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
ENTANGLED BEINGS: A REFLECTION ON MAKING ART ASSEMBLAGES FROM WASTE MATERIALS
CONCLUSION
I tentative advances and retreats in
international human rights and environmental law, I present my beloved and
sorrowful Amazonia, Goddess of Waste Entangled. She is naked, pregnant,
bound and wondering, giving no answers, only questions. A daughter of in-
ternational law’s failures, a sacrifice of everything we hold dear, a non-func-
tioning cyborg, representing the unfortunate pollution of all planetary places
and beings. By making Amazonia, I may have transformed into an artistic
war machine against environmental degradation, this is not generally how
international lawyers behave.
157 157/
OONAGH E. FITZGERALD
• Artspur, “10 Artists Working in Recycled Art,” 1 August 2018,
https://blog.artsper.com/en/get-inspired/top-10-of-recycled-
art/#:~:text=Belgian%20artist%20Wim%20Delvoye%20
is,used%20objects%20into%20spectacular%20artworks.
• Barad, Karen Michelle. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum
Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.
ctv12101zq
• Barad, Karan. “Troubling time/s, undoing the future.” (2016)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnOJioYNHU&ab_
channel=FacultyofArts%2CAarhusUniversitet.
• Barad, Karan. “Aer the end of the world: Entangled nuclear
colonialisms, matters of force, and the material force of
justice.” Theory & event 22, no. 3 (2019): 524–550.
• Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter – A Political Ecology of Things.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, (2010). https://
doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv111jh6w
• Braidotti, Rosi. “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical
Posthumanities.” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 6 (2019):
31–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486.
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Canadian Geographic, “From plastic trash to treasured art:
Five artists invite us to rethink our relationship with plastic,”
June 29, 2020, https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/
from-plastic-trash-to-treasured-art-five-artists-invite-us-to-
rethink-our-relationship-with-plastic/.
• Carson, Rachel, Edward O Wilson, Linda J Lear, Lois Darling,
and Louis Darling. Silent Spring. First Mariner books ed.
Boston: Mariner Book, Houghton Milin Company, 2002.
• Causeartist, “13 Incredible Artivists Using Recycled
Materials in Their Art” Arts, Culture & Entertainment,
https://causeartist.com/incredible-recycled-art-materials-
creations/#:~:text=HA%20Schult%20is%20a%20
German,a%20building%20made%20of%20garbage.
• Chapman, Owen, and Kim Sawchuk. “Research-creation:
Intervention, analysis and ‘family resemblances’,”
Special Issue on Media Arts Revisited, Canadian Journal
of Communication, 37, no. 1 (2012): 5-26. https://doi.
org/10.22230/cjc.2012v37n1a2489
• Charlesworth, Hilary, and Emma Larking, “International Law:
A Discipline of Crisis,” The Modern Law Review 65, no. 3 (2002):
377–392. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.00385
• Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by K.
Cohen and P. Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer, 1976): 875-893
The University of Chicago Press, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.
org/stable/3173239, 887. https://doi.org/10.1086/493306
• Cooke, Lynne. “Essay by Lynne Cooke with statements by
Joseph Beuys”, 7000 Oak, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/
cookebeuys.pdf.
• Corten, Olivier, and Pierre Klein, with drawings by Gérard
Bedoret. Une Histoire Du Droit International: De Salamanque À
Guantanamo. Luçon: Futuropolis, 2022.
• Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
• Derrida, Jacques. Genesis, Geneologies, Genres and Genius.
Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2006.
• Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin. “Matter feels, converses,
suers, desires, yearns and remembers,” Interview with
Karen Barad, in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies,
Open Humanities Press (2012): http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/
ohp.11515701.0001.001.
• Ellis, Carolyn and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography,
personal narrative, reflexivity: research as subject.” In
Handbook of Qualitative Research, second edition, edited by
Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 733-768. Thousand
Oaks: Sage Publications, 2000.
• Geerts, Evelien, and Iris van der Tuin. “The Feminist Futures
of Reading Diractively: How Barad’s Methodology Replaces
Conflict-based Readings of Beauvoir and Irigaray.” Rhizomes
cultural studies in emerging knowledge, no. 30 (2016): https://
doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e02.
• Graham, Martha. “I am a dancer.” In The Routledge Dance
Studies Reader, edited by Jens Richard Giersdorf and Yutian
Wong, 120-125. London and New York: Routledge, 2019, 3d
edition. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315109695-11
• Grear, Anna, “Deconstructing Anthropos: A Critical Legal
Reflection on ‘Anthropocentric’ Law and Anthropocene,”
Humanity (20 May 2015): 225-249, Springer Science+Business
Media Dordrecht, Published online.
• Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology,
and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 171–204. Routledge, 1990.
• Keeling, Diane Marie and Marguerite Nguyen Lehman
“Posthumanism.” Oxford University Press 2018 https://doi.
org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.627.
• Manning, Erin. “Against Method.” in Vannini, Phillip. Non-
Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research.
First edition. New York: Routledge, 2015. https://doi.
org/10.4324/9781315883540.
• McCall, Michal M. “Performance Ethnography: A Brief History
and Some Advice.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research,
second edition, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S.
Lincoln, 421-433. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2000.
• Minh-Ha, Trinh T. Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality
and feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
• Noury, Cynthia, and Louis-Claude Paquin. “(Re)Visiting Our
Previous Contributions for Research-Creation [as Practice] — A
Performative and Polyvocal Writing Project,” Prepublication
Version (Fall 2020): 45.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Cosmopolitan tradition: a noble but
flawed ideal. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. https://doi.
org/10.4159/9780674242975
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
ENTANGLED BEINGS: A REFLECTION ON MAKING ART ASSEMBLAGES FROM WASTE MATERIALS
• Rose, Gillian. Feminism & Geography: The Limits of
Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993.
• Simpson, Gerry. The Sentimental Life of International Law:
Literature, Language, and Longing in World Politics. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1093/
oso/9780192849793.001.0001
• Sullivan, Graeme. Art practice research: Inquiry in the visual
arts. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2004.
• Vaughan, Kathryn. “Pieced together: Collage as an artist’s
method for interdisciplinary research.” International Journal
of Qualitative Methods, 4, no. 1 (2005): 27–52, https://doi.
org/10.1177/160940690500400103
• Wayland Barber, Elizabeth. Women’s Work: The First 20,000
Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. First edition.
New York: Norton, 1994.
• http://vikmuniz.net/news/muntref-vik-muniz
• https://www.haschult.de/picture-boxes#content
159 159/
OONAGH E. FITZGERALD
.
Figure 1. Original artwork and photograph
by Oonagh E. Fitzgerald. International Law
Conference Lanyard Tutu, 2021. Plastic
lanyards, plaster caste mask, fabric
remnants, ballet slippers, single use plastic
bags, turning device, 4’ x 2’.
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
ENTANGLED BEINGS: A REFLECTION ON MAKING ART ASSEMBLAGES FROM WASTE MATERIALS
Figure 2. Original artwork and photograph
by Oonagh E. Fitzgerald. Jeanne B’Arc,
mythical heroine of the Anthropocene, 2021.
Found bark fragments, mod podge, hemp
cord, scrap paper, remnants of acrylic
housepaint, rotation device, 10’ x 7’.
161 161/
OONAGH E. FITZGERALD
Figure 3. Original artwork and photograph
by Oonagh E. Fitzgerald. Gorgon of Waste,
2023. Temporary forms made of paper and
plastic packing materials and reusable
electrical cables, 6’ x 6’ in Eldad Tsabary’s
Waste Whisperer sound installation.
Figure 4. Original artwork and photograph
by Oonagh E. Fitzgerald. Handle with Care:
Values in Our Hearts, 2023. Waste bulbs,
cardboard, fabric, plastic, 2’ x 15”.
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
ENTANGLED BEINGS: A REFLECTION ON MAKING ART ASSEMBLAGES FROM WASTE MATERIALS
Figure 5. Original artwork and
photograph by Oonagh E. Fitzgerald.
Cloak of Shredded Hearts, 2023.
Worn fabric scraps, plastic, 10’ x 3.5’.
Figure 6. Photograph by
Oonagh E. Fitzgerald. Shiny
packaging plastic material.
163 163/
OONAGH E. FITZGERALD
Figure 8. Photograph by Oonagh E.
Fitzgerald, of her artwork Amazonia, Goddess
of Waste, with Elizabeth Presa’s Icons. Eight
Photographs of Mixed Media Sculpture
Installation, on display as part of multimedia
arts exhibition, Arts and Human Rights:
Conversing Multiplicities, at Milieux Institute,
Concordia University May 29-June 8 2023.
Figure 7. Original artwork and photograph by
Oonagh E. Fitzgerald. Rough pregnant form
made from paper and plastic packing materials.
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
ENTANGLED BEINGS: A REFLECTION ON MAKING ART ASSEMBLAGES FROM WASTE MATERIALS
Figure 9. Original artwork and photograph by
Oonagh E. Fitzgerald. More repairs and new
layers (addition of waste fabric and vines).
Figure 10. Original artwork and
photograph by Oonagh E. Fitzgerald.
Repaired and reinstalled, Amazonia,
Goddess of Waste Entangled (August 2023).
Waste packaging paper and plastic, fabric
waste, vines, glue and mod podge, 6’ x 3’.
165 165/
OONAGH E. FITZGERALD
1 Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner, “Autoethnography,
personal narrative, reflexivity: research as subject,” in
Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds. Norman K. Denzin and
Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oak, London, New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 2000, 2d ed.), 733-768, explaining autoethnography
through its enactment, at 738,-739: “Autoethnography is an
autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays
multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the
cultural. Back and forth autoethnographers gaze, first through
an ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing outward on social
and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then, they
look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may
move through, refract, and resist cultural
2 Graeme Sullivan, Art practice research: Inquiry in the visual arts,
(Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2004), 22-23 quoting Maxine
Greene. See also, Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk, “Research-
creation: Intervention, analysis and ‘family resemblances’,”
Special Issue on Media Arts Revisited, Canadian Journal
of Communication, 37, no. 1 (2012): 5-26. At 12, the authors
catalogue many phrases that capture the idea of research-
creation: “practice-led research,” “arts-based research,”
“performative research,” “practice-led research,” “studio-based
inquiry” and “practice as research.” See also, Erin Manning,
“Against Method,” in Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-
Envisioning Research, ed. Phillip Vannini (Routledge: 2015), 52-71,
Web; Cynthia Noury and Louis-Claude Paquin, “(Re)Visiting Our
Previous Contributions for Research-Creation [as Practice] — A
Performative and Polyvocal Writing Project,” Prepublication
Version (Fall 2020): 45. The authors find that, “Research-
creation comes to life when research is taking place through
creation, producing knowledge(s) through that of an original
artifact, performance or work, be it material or immaterial.”
See also, Kathryn Vaughan, “Pieced together: Collage as an
artist’s method for interdisciplinary research,” International
Journal of Qualitative Methods, 4, no. 1 (2005): 27–52, https://doi.
org/10.1177/160940690500400103, proving a meditative account
of research creation through materials and memory.
3 Sullivan, Art Practice, 115.
4 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality
and feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989),
128-129. at 128: “Making material: spinning and weaving is a
euphonious heritage of wo/mankind handed on from generation
to generation of weavers within the clapping of the shuttle and
creaking of the block – which the Dogon call “the creaking of the
Word.” See also Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The
First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. 1st
ed. (New York: Norton, 1994).
5 Karen Michelle Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum
Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, (Durham
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 29, 30. Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari use the term “refrain” with similar intent: Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), 348: “Glass harmonica: the refrain is a
prism, a crystal of space-time. It acts upon that which surrounds
it, sound or light, extracting from it various vibrations, or
decompositions, projections, or transformations.”
6 Gerry Simpson, The Sentimental Life of International Law:
Literature, Language, and Longing in World Politics. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2022), 76-77. For a visual\material
reflection on my experience of international law, see Appendix I.
Figure 8.
7 Simpson, Sentimental Life, 78-79.
8 Hilary Charlesworth and Emma Larking, “International Law:
A Discipline of Crisis,” The Modern Law Review 65, no. 3 (2002):
377–392.
9 Anna Grear, “Deconstructing Anthropos: A Critical Legal
Reflection on ‘Anthropocentric’ Law and Anthropocene,”
Humanity (20 May 2015): Springer Science+Business Media
Dordrecht, Published online: 227.
10 Grear, “Deconstructing Anthropos,” 235, 236.
11 Grear, “Deconstructing Anthropos,” 244, 246.
12 Martha C. Nussbaum, Cosmopolitan tradition: a noble but flawed
ideal (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2019), chapter 1, World Citizens; also 69-72.
13 Nussbaum, Cosmopolitan tradition, 111,112. Even duties of
justice (negative duties to do no harm) cost money to protect
and enforce: 103.
14 Nussbaum, Cosmopolitan tradition, 264-296.
15 The devastating impact of manmade pesticides on wildlife and
humans was first brought to public attention by Rachel Carson
in the 1960’s: Rachel Carson, Edward O Wilson, Linda J Lear, Lois
Darling, and Louis Darling. Silent Spring. First Mariner books ed.
Boston: Mariner Book, Houghton Milin Company, 2002, first
published in 1962.
16 Karen Barad writes and talks about how nuclear bombs
were tested and exploded on lands and waters of Indigenous
peoples, adding to their dispossession and dislocation. She
sees a tight connection between the policy of Mutually Assured
Destruction (MAD!) that hangs over this earth, thanks to a
handful of nuclear-armed countries, and enduring colonialism.
Karan Barad, Troubling time/s, undoing the future (2016)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnOJioYNHU&ab_
channel=FacultyofArts%2CAarhusUniversitet. Karan Barad,
“Aer the end of the world: Entangled nuclear colonialisms,
matters of force, and the material force of justice,” Theory & event
22, no. 3 (2019): 524–550.
17 Rosi Braidotti, “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical
Posthumanities,” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 6 (2019):
31–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486, 32: “I will
take a materialist approach, and inscribe the Anthropocene
as a multi-layered posthuman predicament that includes the
environmental, socio-economic, and aective and psychic
dimensions of our ecologies of belonging (Guattari, 2000).
18 For an entertaining, irreverent, and insightful overview of the
history of international law, see, Olivier Corten and Pierre
Klein, with drawings by Gérard Bedoret. Une Histoire Du Droit
International: De Salamanque À Guantanamo. Luçon: Futuropolis,
2022.
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
ENTANGLED BEINGS: A REFLECTION ON MAKING ART ASSEMBLAGES FROM WASTE MATERIALS
19 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. K. Cohen,
K. and P. Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer, 1976): 875-893 The
University of Chicago Press, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.
org/stable/3173239, 887. See also, Jacques Derrida, Genesis,
Geneologies, Genres and Genius, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic,
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 56. Judith Butler
explains this impossibility of using the oppressor’s political tools
to liberate the oppressed: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 2-3. See also, Gillian Rose, Feminism &
Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1993), 15.
20 Braidotti, “Critical Posthumanities,” 33-34.
21 Diane Marie Keeling and Marguerite Nguyen Lehman,
“Posthumanism,” Oxford University Press 2018 https://doi.
org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.627.
22 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter – A Political Ecology of Things.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, (2010), viii.
23 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, 3. “Matter feels, converses,
suers, desires, yearns and remembers,” Interview with
Karen Barad, in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies,
Open Humanities Press (2012): http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/
ohp.11515701.0001.001. Evelien Geerts and Iris van der Tuin,
“The Feminist Futures of Reading Diractively: How Barad’s
Methodology Replaces Conflict-based Readings of Beauvoir and
Irigaray,” Rhizomes cultural studies in emerging knowledge, no. 30
(2016): https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e02, para.22.
24 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women, (New York: Routledge, 1990), 171–204, 181.
25 Martha Graham, “I am a dancer”, in The Routledge Dance Studies
Reader, eds. Jens Richard Giersdorf and Yutian Wong (London
and New York: Routledge, 2019, 3d edition), 120-125, 120-121.
26 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 374-376.
27 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 204.
28 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 222, see their
chapter entitled 1227: Treatise on Nomadology - The War
Machine, 388.
29 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 421-422.
30 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 422-423.
31 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 423 (the authors’
italics).
32 Here are sources pointing to the work of notable recycling
artists: Artspur, “10 Artists Working in Recycled Art,” 1 August
2018, https://blog.artsper.com/en/get-inspired/top-10-of-
recycled-art/#:~:text=Belgian%20artist%20Wim%20Delvoye%20
is,used%20objects%20into%20spectacular%20artworks;
Canadian Geographic, “From plastic trash to treasured art:
Five artists invite us to rethink our relationship with plastic,”
June 29, 2020, https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/from-
plastic-trash-to-treasured-art-five-artists-invite-us-to-rethink-
our-relationship-with-plastic/; Causeartist, “13 Incredible
Artivists Using Recycled Materials in Their Art” Arts, Culture &
Entertainment, https://causeartist.com/incredible-recycled-
art-materials-creations/#:~:text=HA%20Schult%20is%20
a%20German,a%20building%20made%20of%20garbage;
Lynne Cooke. “Essay by Lynne Cooke with statements by
Joseph Beuys”, 7000 Oak, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/
cookebeuys.pdf; http://vikmuniz.net/news/muntref-vik-muniz;
https://www.haschult.de/picture-boxes#content.
33 Michal M. McCall, “Performance Ethnography: A Brief History and
Some Advice,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds. Norman
K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oak, London, New
Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000, 2d ed.), 421-433, 421-423. McCall
gives a brief overview of the historic avant-garde performance
movement, tracing futurism, dadaism, surrealism, events,
happenings, performance art or body art, experimental theatre
performances.
34 Our clothing, toiletries, cyborg extensions (glasses, contact
lenses, phone cases, cables), and the plastic our food comes in
are all part of this problem.
35 https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/.
