Discards by design: recovering waste in the making

Art students today know the rules: no solvents in the trash, no clay down the drain, and don’t forget to cure that resin before you toss it. Premodern craftspeople had their own rituals of disposal, too—albeit ones driven more by economies of thrift than by environmental regulation or fire safety. This article explores the materiality, spatiality, and processing of waste in workshops past and present, focusing on two emblems, the shaving and the bin. Recovering waste in the making, we chart the axis of disposal from bench to floor, and back again, asking what it means for discards to fall up through the iterative feedback loops of process.