M A T E R I A L C U L T U R E
“I wanted to show that waste can be turned into
a commodity on a local scale. ”— Virginia Gardiner
commenting on her waste-based waterless toilet.
In Praise
of Poop
S T O R Y BY
Iain Aitch
If you are already shaking Virginia Gar-
diner’s hand when you ask that dreaded din-
ner party question, “And what do you do?’
you’d be forgiven for excusing yourself
to visit the bathroom, or surreptitiously
wiping your hand on the back of your trou-
sers as she looks away. This is because the
London-based Gardiner’s answer to that
inquiry is likely to involve a lengthy explana-
tion that includes just about every different
term you can think of for excrement.
A similar reaction awaits Gardiner’s
work from those who are not familiar with
her practice. Her palm-sized dodecahedron
Poo Gems may have the consistency of
a seed-based chewy snack from Whole
Foods, but they are certainly not meant to
be eaten. “I had a technician at my college
sizing one up in his hand and asking, ‘What
is this?”’ Gardiner says. “He just put it
down very gently when I said it was shit.”
In her defense, Gardiner can claim that
she works with the highest quality feces:
her excreta of choice is horse manure from
the Queen’s Household Cavalry in Knights-
bridge. So her customers can be assured
that it has come from the finest military
thoroughbreds-a fortuitous side effect of
Gardiner’s knowing that she wanted to
work with manure but having no idea where
to get it in large quantities.
“I was racking my brain thinking, ‘Where
am I going to get this material in London?”’
she says. “I thought I’d have to go into the
countryside to get it. I called Kew Gardens.
I knew they would use manure, and they
said try the [cavalry] horses in Hyde Park.
I see them all the time, as well as the police
horses when they have football matches.
I realized there were probably tons of it.
I rang up this guy, and he brought me a
bucketful of it.”
Mixed with a sunflower seed eco-resin,
the manure forms a tough yet malleable
mass. This works well with soft molds, such
as that for the deer heads that Gardiner has
made in collaboration with Australian-born
artist Sharon Green, producing a surpris-
ingly smooth finish.
Gardiner’s desire to work with fecal
matter came from a larger project that was
her main focus while studying industrial
design engineering at the Royal College of
Art. Brooklyn-born Gardiner had been
working as a journalist in San Francisco, but
her passion is design. Her research around
sanitation led her to school in England and
the design of a waterless toilet, the Gardiner
C H
4
,
which is about to undergo commercial
testing in Nigeria.
The sale of Poo Gems and Deer Heads
has contributed to the ongoing refinement
of Gardiner’s lavatory design. They have
also been useful in exploring the ideas that
inspired her toilet, which enables users to
trade the excrement collected for methane
gas, which can then be used as cooking fuel.
The refuse becomes a valuable resource.
It also makes for a cleaner supply of water,
which might otherwise be contaminated
by waste.
“Turning shit into a commodity is very
much a part of my toilet idea. People will
pay for it, and I wanted to show that waste
can be turned into a commodity on a local
scale.” The idea of waste as commodity met
the idea of waste as raw material in Gar-
diner’s final project at the Royal College of
Art, where she molded a version of her
prototype toilet from the resin and manure
mix. A toilet made from excrement is the
ultimate recycling statement, though using
manure on such a large scale has its prob-
lems, aside from the smell.
“It’s actually really difficult to mix with
resin. When you combine anything with
H ,o
molecules in it, even if it looks dry, it just
032
american craft
apr/may09
Photos/Sharon Green.
