If you were one of the thousands who visited this year’s Frieze art show in London this October, you may have unwittingly contributed to an artwork commissioned by the RSA’s Arts and Ecology Centre.

If, as you were leaving, you threw away some of the mountains of flyers and leaflets you were handed during your visit, or maybe tossed an emptied water bottle into the bin as you exited, your debris may have ended up in one of the three large Eurobins placed surreptitiously by the exit by the Danish artist Tue Greenfort.

Greenfort had already been commissioned to create a piece of new work inside the fair. An artist whose work often deals with our relationship to the environment, his ‘official’ Frieze piece, Body Water Condensation was a secluded, darkened room, cooled by a massive dehumidifier. Visitors, lulled inside by the calm of Greenfort’s room, watched as the moisture from their bodies was quite literally sucked ou, to be dripped,  before their eyes, into recycled plastic bottles. More than just a dig at the environmental cost of the bottled water industry, it was a hymn to the preciousness of water.

The RSA-commissioned artwork was equally about what you left behind; in this case, rubbish. ‘I was interested to see the amount of leftover material which comes from the fair,’ says the 35-year-old artist, who lives and works in Berlin, ‘and to see the types of material… plastic cups, bottles.’

He’s one of a number of artists who make work about the environment that sends out unashamedly unambiguous messages. Taking three standard Eurobins, Greenfort who’s long been interested in why London recycles less efficiently than say, Germany, or his native Denmark, Greenfort simply cut away the sides, replacing them with clear plastic. As the art curator Max Andrews who worked on commissioning this untitled work writes: ‘Transparency, frequency the jargon-credential in a democratic process, becomes a sculptural fact.’

Greenfort sees his work connecting back to a longer tradition of environmentally-informed art. ‘I work in a long tradition from the 1970s, which is connecting art and ecology,’ he says, ‘and my main thing is to do art which expands the notion of what art might be.’ It’s work in progress. At the end of the fair, Greenfort ended up with three giant Eurobins full of rubbish; to Greenfort this too is potential material, awaiting further work.

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Read curator Max Andrews' piece Talking Trash and Not Wasting Away on Tue Greenfort's work here.

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