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Melbourne-based artist Ash Keating intercepts and manipulates discarded waste to highlight the ecological fallout of mass-production and global capitalism. Having worked for a waste audit and consultancy company for the past five years, Keating is a self-described 'witness to the hidden waste that industry creates and disposes of in landfill daily'. His process-based practice thus exposes industry's gross acts of environmental exploitation and mismanagement, but transcends allegory or mere finger-pointing to present alternative models for environmental reclamation and sustainable living.

His most recent art project 2020?, 2008, was presented at this year's Next Wave Festival, Melbourne. For this, Keating entered into a long and careful negotiation with multi-national waste-management company SITA to redirect two 23-cubic metre truckloads of commercial and industrial landfill waste to the cavernous spaces of Melbourne's Meat Market complex. He then quickly reconfigured the intercepted waste into a gargantuan, explosive-looking sculptural assemblage that was presented for one-night-only against a spectacular backdrop of collaged billboard 'skins'. The following day the monumental sculpture was demolished and its materials segregated into waste-audit categories, ready for use by a group of invited artists who, for the remainder of the exhibition, fossicked through the vast collection of debris to create a constantly evolving, walk-through installation. The artists' exhaustive actions were also captured on time-lapsed, closed-circuit video; their hurried, Lilliputian-like figures imbuing the scene with a poignant, if uneasy, sense of futility.

Indeed, the subject of much of Keating's work is the labour expended to produce it, with an emphasis on repetitive processes and human toil in the face of mammoth environmental destruction. In the Westspace, Melbourne/Artspace, Sydney, project 250 hours - work for 1 person / press release, 2005-07, the artist highlighted the environmentally-abusive distribution practices of mX newspaper, the trashy tabloid publication that is circulated to, and thoughtlessly discarded by thousands of Melbourne public-transport users every day.

Exploring the 'human-undoing of machine production', over 6000 copies of mX were intercepted by the artist each day for a one-week period, and then reconfigured into piles of the same page. This circuitous project culminated with the collection of the newspaper installation by a recycling company - an action that created a redundancy within the project's own closed sequence at the same time that it unfurled new narratives and practical possibilities. Keating filmed himself meticulously cutting out an image of the rare Australasian gannet bird from the Tuesday edition of his entire newspaper collection, later performing a series of public actions that symbolically released the fragile paper-bird from its commercial captivity...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2008 issue.