What do you do with your old plastic bread tags?
Scoop them into the bin? Keep them in a little stash in the corner of your kitchen?
Shani Nottingham is a multi-disciplinary artist from central west New South Wales, and she turns them into works of art, with an environmental message.
"It started many years ago when I had a teenage son who would come home and eat so much bread," she said.
"Being a messy teenager, he would leave all the bread tags on the countertops. And I really don't know why, but instead of throwing them away I just put them in a little container.
"I'm an artist and I love colour, so one day I just looked at them and I thought, these are actually really pretty colours, they’re really interesting.
"I made some simple little pictures with them and was just mucking about, put them on Instagram, and I had a good reaction from them and I thought, oh maybe I should do some more of this."
Nottingham began to research colours and shapes of bread tags, but was soon horrified by what she learned. Not only does the small size of the tags make them difficult for larger depots to recycle, but the vast majority are made of plastic.
"When I started reading about them I was like, oh my gosh these things are actually horrible, really horrible.
"They're very hard to recycle because they’re made of plastic number six polystyrene, and they get swallowed by animals and fish and they turn into micro-plastics and release chemicals, and I was kind of gobsmacked.
"Coming from a background where I have a family that cares about the environment … I just thought, maybe I could make art out of bread tags to draw attention to how horrible these things are."
And so began the Bread Tag Project – an ambitious artistic endeavour that has seen her transform millions of bread tags from right around the world, into art with a message.
For example, Nottingham's latest installation, Plasticus Organicus at Belconnen Arts Centre in Canberra, is made up of about a million bread tags, melted together or clipped onto discarded roadside and tip shop finds, to create "another world".
"My initial idea behind the instillation was that we're creating so much waste that we're almost creating our own world," she explained.
"I'm not going to tell people exactly what it is because I want them to come up with their own interpretation.
"Some people say it looks like coral, other people say it looks like some crazy world in their imagination, like Willy Wonka."
But it is the cumulative effect of these bread tags — as colourful and surprisingly beautiful as they are — that Nottingham wants people to notice.
"The whole idea behind these big installations is that one little bread tag doesn't seem like much, but you add another one and another one and another one and it becomes massive, it becomes a huge problem," she said.
"It is a visual representation of how much waste adds up."
From humble beginnings
Nottingham started her bread tag project by asking friends and family to save their tags for her — and they thought it was a little weird.
"Initially people used to roll their eyes and think I was very strange, and then War on Waste happened on the ABC and that kind of changed people's preconceptions," she said.
"People said: 'I can understand what you're trying to say now.'"
Now, Nottingham is sent plastic bread tags from all over the world, and jokes that she'll collect as many bread tags as she can "before they become extinct".
"At the moment I have about 17 countries, and I've got probably about 500 different types so far in the collection. I get them from all around the world — mainly Australia of course, but all around the world," she said.
So far, Nottingham has turned the bread tags into art installations around the country, exhibitions, sculptures, a book, and an alphabet of images, to name just a few projects.
She draws on her background in photography and wildlife illustration to create each piece, but also says she has reached the stage of her career where she wants her art to have real meaning.
"I'm older now, so I don't feel like just producing pretty pictures anymore," she said.
"I just feel like there's that thing inside me that wants to say something a little bit more now."
An awareness campaign
Loading...Firm in her conviction that art should convey a message, Nottingham tapped into the power of social media, documenting her bread tag project on Instagram.
"I realised early on I wanted this to be at an awareness campaign," she said.
"I want to create art for beauty and aesthetics, but also to create a space for dialogue.
"There are a lot of people who won't necessarily go into galleries, especially public galleries. Social media is where so many people get their information and their visual hit, so I was like 'OK, if I'm going to get this [message] out there … I need to leverage this'.
"It's worked really really well, it's where I get most of the people sending me tags and it's where I get that message out there. I get loads of responses from families who say their kids look for bread tags everywhere."
For now, Nottingham is happy to save people's discarded bread tags from landfill.
But ultimately, she hopes the tags "will be one of those things that belong to the past".
"I have a thing called the Doomsday Project," she said.
"The idea is to get the most comprehensive collection of bread tags in the world as I possibly can before they become extinct – because the hope is that they will become extinct."
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