New Plymouth artist Volker Hawighorst. Photo / Mark Dwyer
New Plymouth artist Volker Hawighorst. Photo / Mark Dwyer
New Plymouth artist Volker Hawighorst, who practised as an architect in Germany, explains how hundreds of thousands of recycled plastic bread tags have ended up in his work.
My dad always collected old newspapers. There was no recycling back then, but he said there was so much intellectual energy andphysical energy involved in producing them. And paper is a good material. He used it on the compost and to cover the garden beds in winter to protect them from frost.
In Germany, after the war, people didn’t have anything. That’s how we were brought up, so those recycling genes are deeply anchored in me. I always think, do I throw it away? And what does it mean to throw something away? It doesn’t go away from this Earth. If we look at the overconsumption of goods these days, I would love more people to be thinking that way.
Not long after I moved to Taranaki, there was a sad article in the local paper about a primary school that had made a deal with a disability equipment shop that if they could collect the equivalent weight of a wheelchair in plastic bread tags — 15.5kg — the company would donate a wheelchair to a person in need.
It took the school and their whānau about two years to get that amount together. By then, the guy who’d made the arrangement with them had left. So the teacher was asking if anyone could do something with 45,000 bread tags, because they didn’t want to just throw them out. Often I’ll put things away because I think I might have a need for them in the future, without knowing exactly what. This was one of those cases.
Seven or eight years ago, I had a period of very bad health with cancer. Surgery, radiation, chemotherapy — the whole programme. It was successful. The tumour is beaten. But I was down for two years in a very physically and psychologically disastrous situation. I remembered these bread tags sitting somewhere in the garage and knew I had to do something with them to take my mind in a different direction. So it was a kind of self-therapy that eventually developed into serious artwork.
His signature medium, the recycled plastic bread tags in Hawighorst's work highlight issues around sustainability.
My little studio at home is the core room where I do all my sorting and glueing. I have a workshop in the garage where I do some framing and mounting on boards and another place where I do all the cleaning. Each year, I use 100,000-plus recycled bread tags in my work. There are containers full of them all over the house.
I have a couple of main suppliers and two or three times a month, there’s a little bag of bread tags in our mailbox. People know I collect them and just drop them off. But it’s a battle to get them now because the plastic ones are being replaced by cardboard, which I don’t see as my medium. But actually, the bread tag itself is not that important to me. I’m after the result I can reach with it.
My thinking has always been very modular, not only with my art but with my architectural work as well. With these small, mundane pieces, I can create an effect that is completely different and perhaps a bit surprising. People ask, “Is it textile?” “Is it ceramic?” And then they come closer and sometimes that’s when a discussion starts.
What I feel about the whole [climate crisis] situation is everything else than positive. In New Zealand, we have a lot to do. The Government has to do the right thing. The economy is important, of course, but nature and the world are more important. That little bread-tag thinking can be the same in every field of life. How do I live and what do I use for living? Can I buy something second-hand instead of new, so that extra doesn’t have to be produced for my purposes? Every single person has to think about consumption and adjust to create a positive effect.
As an immigrant, I still feel that I’m partly in a different culture, even after 20 years. So another aspect for me is that these bread tags have all been through Kiwi families — through Kiwi hands and kitchen tables. So it gives me a little symbolic contact with the whole society and a way to be part of it by having these pieces in my work.
— as told to Joanna Wane
A former architect and cabinet maker originally from Germany, artist Volker Hawighorst won the 2022 Sustainability Award at Art in the Park and will be one of 100 painters, sculptors, photographers and printmakers at the art show when it returns to Auckland’s Eden Park, September 7-10.
