Eco-artist and designer Ife Abhulimen‘s sculpture, Dark in Nature, explores persistence by holding an object in place long enough to be noticed. Emerging from the space between appearance and disappearance, it questions our notions of ‘waste’ and ‘away’.
960 words: estimated reading time = approximately 4 minutes
Often times, the moment something becomes ‘waste,’ it also becomes easy to forget.
And then, once it leaves our hands, we move on. We carry on with our day as usual and rarely stop to wonder where it ends up.
Every year, we discard hundreds of millions of tons of plastic. Most of it slips quietly out of view into landfills, oceans, into places we don’t have to look at. And once it’s gone from sight, it becomes easier to believe it’s gone altogether.
Out of sight, out of mind.
But some things don’t often follow that saying.
What we choose not to see
Most of what we throw away is designed to leave us quickly. A bottle is used for minutes. Packaging is torn open and discarded without a second thought. These objects pass through our hands so briefly; it almost feels like they were never really there to begin with.
And yet, they remain, just not where we can see them. That absence creates a kind of comfort. If it’s no longer in front of us, it no longer belongs to us. It becomes someone else’s problem. Somewhere else’s reality.
But that distance is thin. Almost imaginary.
It didn’t start as art
Dark in Nature, one of the pieces from my recent solo exhibition, Delicate Resilience, began in that space between presence and disappearance. It is made from reclaimed plastic bottles, wire, textile scraps. Materials that were once held, used, and then set aside. Things that had already reached what we might call their end but in my mind still had potential to become a conversation piece. At the centre, a darkened organic-looking structure holds fragments within it, bits of colour and texture held in another bottle that feel like remnants of something that hasn’t fully let go. Around it, the forms extend outward. Bottles bend and stretch, no longer functioning as they once did, but not erased either.
They linger, outliving us by generations.
Something is still happening
There’s a sense of movement in this piece of work. The wire reaches outward, almost searching, almost restless. The forms resist stillness. They push past the boundaries that try to contain them.
And then, unexpectedly, there are the yellow elements. They resemble flowers; small, delicate, almost hopeful. For a moment, they suggest something familiar. Something natural. Something alive.
But they are not what they seem.
They are constructed, like everything else in this piece. Placed there, not grown there. These ‘flowers’ hint at nature’s persistence, its quiet way of pushing against human interference, always trying to find a way to thrive.
The illusion of growth
That’s where the tension sits. Dark in Nature holds that contradiction quietly. It looks like growth, but it isn’t the kind we understand. These materials do not return to the earth. They do not follow the cycles we associate with life.
They stay, they break, they shift, they scatter but they remain part of the world, whether we see them or not.
So what we are looking at isn’t growth in the traditional sense. It’s persistence taking on the shape of something we recognise.
What happens after we look away?
When we throw something away, we rarely imagine its future. We don’t picture where it settles. How long it stays. What it becomes over time. But that doesn’t mean it disappears. It simply moves beyond the edges of our attention. This piece brings it back from that distance. It gathers what was scattered. It places it in front of us again, not as it was, but as something we can’t ignore quite as easily.
Not gone, just repositioned
Nothing here is new.
Every part of it has existed before, used differently, for an original purpose. All that has changed is the context. The way it is seen after some artistic manipulation. The fact that it is being looked at again. And maybe that’s enough to unsettle something. Because if these materials were never truly gone, just relocated, reshaped, reassembled, then the idea of ‘away’ starts to feel uncertain.
Dark in Nature – a small shift
This work doesn’t offer answers.
It doesn’t tell you what to do or how to respond.
It simply holds something in place long enough for it to be noticed.
And sometimes, that’s where change begins, not in immediate action, but first in awareness.
Because once you begin to notice what doesn’t disappear, it becomes harder to believe in the idea of ‘away’. And maybe ‘out of sight, out of mind’ was never the full story.
Maybe it’s just the part we chose to accept.
Find more
You can find more on the recent exhibition of Ife’s work, which included Dark in Nature, in our Creative Showcase piece, Delicate Resilience: Where Nature Refuses to Give Up.
Elsewhere on our blog, in Starting to See Waste as Art and Heritage, curator Veronica Sekules introduces her special essay for our Longer feature, using an exhibition at GroundWork Gallery to explore artists’ roles in helping change how we value what we discard.
***
From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.
Ife – “I use AI to create mockups and nice backgrounds for my art pieces, which has been very helpful especially when I want to showcase work in a different setting. In addition, I use AI to do research as it helps me filter all the fluff, in contrast to Google search, and it gives relevant information. I also use it to search for opportunities in the sustainable art space. I try not to use it a lot because I think it’s robbing us of our capacity to think as intelligent humans. For this post, I have used AI to help with grammar corrections.”
