Rethinking waste, one art project at a time

Paper landfills, demolished concrete stoops and abandoned construction sites are unlikely places to discover art materials — unless you have as keen an eye as Kaitlin Pomerantz, who knows how to find the beauty and history in what’s been overlooked or tossed aside. She’s just as adept at reconstructing the histories these waste materials contain. 

A mixed-media artist, Pomerantz uses her art to challenge the idea that wastefulness has to be the norm in urban spaces like Philadelphia, her home for more than a decade. It’s a radical position during an era of hyper-consumption, a moment when it can somehow feel normal — even natural — for cityscapes to be overrun with single-use plastics and other trash, and for buildings and weedy plots to be forsaken instead of repurposed.

“The concept of trash and disposability had to be taught to people,” she says. “It’s not inherent.” Now, Pomerantz is trying to un-teach it. She runs a design course at the University of Pennsylvania called MATTERS, which dissects the processes of discarding versus preserving materials through hands-on projects and field explorations. “Nothing is ‘waste,’” she says. “We don’t have to waste anything.”

In Philadelphia, as in many large cities, locals are currently combating a surplus of illegally dumped construction debris. Aside from trash, the city is also rife with other environmental challenges — from tainted air and water to environmentally-induced diseases like asthma — that make it hard to focus on bigger questions about consumption and ecology.  

Pomerantz was thinking critically about waste and materials long before she committed to artistry and education. It all began with two resources: pigments and trees. One was for painting, the other for homes and paper. As a child, she became immersed in the art world simply because she wanted to know the untold stories of paints. Where did they come from and what were they made of?  These questions struck Pomerantz again in the summer of 2010  when she watched a truck full of wood whiz past her on a road. At the time, Pomerantz was working at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.

“That was kind of my entry point to materials; seeing a logging truck in Maine and realizing it was being shipped elsewhere,” Pomerantz recalls. Her mind drifted from the timber to its destination, and how it was removed from its original environment to be commoditized by humans. She thought of all the memories the wood now held. 

If you ask Pomerantz about wood now, she’ll go on a tangent about paper mills and the “spirit of the paper” that ropes you in from the very first word. And don’t get her started on the shift from metal cups to single-use plastic ones. “Why the heck would we throw out a cup every time?” she asks.

Pomerantz’s 2023 work, “to fault a net for having holes” explores the living memory of plastic. A cyclical story, it embodies the current plastisphere, neglecting of bodies, and the instability and prominence of capitalism. [Credit: Courtesy of Kaitlin Pomerantz]

The battles she fights for sustainability are part of a larger movement many designers are joining. What’s different about Pomerantz’s approach to repurposing is that it’s directly embedded in the Philadelphia neighborhoods where she’s become “a central presence and ever-present beacon,” says Ksenia Nouril, who has worked with Pomerantz as the director of the Art Students League gallery. Pomerantz is someone who “sees through the land and the environment, and takes stock of what’s happening” to bring back forgotten histories of marginalized people, Nouril says.     

Her beliefs, like her art, ooze passion. She’s just as passionate about the unique ways she hunts down her materials — objects from the earth that have been transformed to become “usable.”     

“For a while I was collecting all the time. It’s almost like I had a library of materials and would pull from them to make work,” Pomerantz says. For hours, she’d look beneath her feet for something special; spot bricks or shards of glass in landfills. Sometimes, she would notice a plot of land with a building she felt would soon be destroyed, and would create a message from that.     

More recently, however, there’s been a shift in the way she orders her artistic process. “Now I work more in a way where I have an idea for a project and that leads me to source a certain material.” She lets her surroundings and her students inspire pieces, whether those pieces are about herself or how the world could function more cohesively and sustainably if communities reimagined what waste meant.   

Her current project, “Viriditas,” is a collection stemming from her love of plants and the gradual loss of greenery being printed on US currency. [Credit: Courtesy of Kaitlin Pomerantz]

Her work with land and materials inspired her latest essay, “Material Matters, Material Lives: Words of the Not-Yet, Right-Now,” published in October 2023 in a larger compilation of art essays. Fellow artist Lindsay Buchman, who has known Pomerantz since their days as MFA students, highlights Pomerantz’s ability to open up critical conversations. In her essay, Pomerantz is “talking about how things don’t go away, and we really need to be thinking about this as artists,” according to Buchman.    

“She has a much more crystallized interpretation about [society now] than she did when I met her eight years ago,” Buchman says. “It’s been very inspiring to see that in her.”    

After 15 years being engrossed in the world of art, ecology and our connection to places, Pomerantz is now collaborating with the Philadelphia Water Department, scientists and local artists to raise awareness about flood mitigation in Germantown. She hopes her artwork can reflect a movement towards public engagement and prioritizing voices of residents plagued by the floods.   

All the while Pomerantz remains determined in the face of a world awash in waste. Her artwork provides a lens for her to look back to the past for ways to ease consumption and pollution. She’s convinced that remembering the ecologies contained within materials, lands and waste could provide answers to modern crises.

Her piece “Site to be Seen” for the 10-acre Philadelphia Metal Bank Superfund Site on the Delaware River does exactly that. Pomerantz designed a strip of paper containing step-by-step instructions on how to crease it like origami. And with each fold or unfold, a sentence would appear describing some aspect of the river’s story, including what the area was like as Lenape territory before colonization, how industrial pollution destroyed it and measures to clean it up. Instead of just hiding contaminants underneath a cap, Pomerantz thinks that remediating the problem starts with opening the site to be used by the public. 

“As we’re looking for solutions, we sometimes think, ‘oh, we have to invent totally new things and systems,’” she says. “When no, a lot of [the answers] are in the past. Not everything has to be disposable or forgotten.”