Abigail Hunt: What We Leave Behind

How are we held responsible for the objects and artworks we create and the things we leave behind through the process of making?

Abigail Hunt leads our Play:Make:Art Early Years programme, curating objects and environments to encourage playful responses from children and their accompanying adults. In both her own visual art practice and in the facilitation of workshops, she is interested in the responsibility we all have in using materials. What happens to the new objects and artworks we make after a workshop or event?

Abigail’s practice holds unresolved questions. She is a maker of objects and an artist who values the haptic experience of holding objects. While she struggles with the idea of waste, she also believes strongly in encouraging creativity and making, and she knows that to do this without materials would be impossible.

Abigail carefully selects materials for the Play:Make:Art workshops that are already repurposed or can be re-used and adapted for continued use. Despite this careful thinking and planning, art-making workshops in their very nature still generate waste and remnants left behind. Art workshops often even make recyclable materials difficult to recycle. When we add paint or tape, attach materials to other materials and cut them up into small pieces, they become un-recyclable.

For the Cultural Reforesting exhibition, Abigail collected remnants leftover from Play:Make:Art sessions that would otherwise be thrown away. She took them back to her own studio to explore their continued potential and usability, incorporating them into her own artworks. Collaged works, reappropriated drawings and sculptural remnants are displayed as static moments which pause to reflect on the making processes reminiscent of both Play:Make:Art and the artist’s studio.