If you’re anything like me, you’ve often wondered what happens to our recycling after we chuck it in the big blue bin. At Recology, one of the major recycling collection services in King County, it’s being turned into art.
“It’s funny to think of trash in a woo-woo sense, but being immersed in a never-ending stream of material at Recology—it changes you,” says Seattle artist Amanda Manitach, who now co-manages Recology’s artist in residence (AIR) program alongside Maria Phillips after completing her own residency at the south Seattle facility in 2023. “It rips the blinders off and makes you feel connected to the material world.”
The King County Recology AIR program has been running since 2015 and was inspired by a similar program begun in San Francisco in the 1990s. “It all began thanks to a San Francisco-based artist named Jo Hanson, who was an activist passionate about urban clean-ups,” explains Manitach. “In the ‘70s she worked with the city to develop a program for artists that granted them access to the city dump to utilize discarded materials, and voila! The AIR program was born.”
Every year from May to September, Recology welcomes two artists to take up shop in their main facility off Marginal Way, which is where material comes to get processed after being collected across the county. Here, a massive structure houses “the machine”: a giant green, Willy Wonka-esque sorting apparatus that runs piles of cardboard, glass, plastic, and other recyclables through its many chutes, tubes, and conveyer belts. A crew of commendable Recology employees helps sort the stuff, yanking out anything that doesn’t belong, like the VHS tape ribbon and sparkly pink plastic unicorn I saw on my visit.
“I had always been a bit of an environmentalist nerd, even as a kid growing up in a very non-recycling-friendly part of rural Texas in the '90s,” says Manitach. “But being immersed in the residency completely shifted how I think of material, from the atomic level to the Milky Way. And especially how I think about plastic.”
For her residency artworks, Manitach continued her signature text-based work, her cheeky aphorisms becoming all the more audacious when rendered in detritus. It’s clear the residency hit home with Manitach, who rattles off facts about the recycling process as she tours me around the facility.
For 2024, Recology is hosting Seattle artists Kalina Winska and Margie Livingston, who will have access to any materials scavenged from the main facility, as well as the North Transfer station and Recology stores (where folks can drop off hard-to-recycle items like styrofoam, e-waste, and textiles). While the artists are not yet sure what they will create, they are diving head first into the discovery process, and it’s clear the dearth of materials at their fingertips is already inspiring them. Winska is interested in continuing her previous work around the environment and its technological transformations through map-related imagery, while Livingston is looking forward to starting a new body of work after wrapping a major exhibition that opened in May of this year.
For both artists, the culmination of their residency will be an exhibition at Mutuus Studio in Georgetown opening September 7, with a reception on September 6 from 6-9 pm. While the final outcome for Winska and Livingston is yet to be formed, if Manitach’s experience is any indication, their relationship to the “stuff” of our everyday lives will likely never be the same.
