Over the past year I have been using various recycled media, often in combination with the red-and-white colours of a STOP sign, to spell out a new binary/ascii message, which decoded reads:

rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable & sustainable future for all: IPCC 2023

It's a quote from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who in March of 2023 published their Sixth Assessment Report. In Part C of their “Headline statements…’, under the heading Responses in the Near Term, C1: Urgency of Near-Term Integrated Climate Action, is written:

“Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health (very high confidence). There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence).” (1)

The works is a 10 x scale up of previous works that use 5mm x 5mm enamelled squares to spell out a message in binary/ascii, like in the Drone and body/politic series. In this iteration, the 50mm x 50mm diameter coloured plates are made from recycled lids - steel ones from glass jars and plastic ones from all sorts of containers. The chain, modeled on the 2.5mm x 1mm chain sourced from Germany, is handmade made from street sweeper bristles.

Steel street sweeping bristles are used by large street sweeper trucks in industrialised cities, when they clean the roads. In time, like all metal, these steel blades work harden and break from the machines. They fall to the gutter and are left behind to rust on city streets the world over. Thousands of these thin metal strips have been collected by me and on my behalf by friends in many cities, including Canberra, Melbourne and Perth in Australia, from Seattle in the USA and Hanoi in Vietnam.