Resin fruit peel, bronze bin bags and marble loo rolls are among the items of detritus being immortalised by artists – and fetching a high price

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On the second floor of Hany Armanious’s exhibition at Buxton Contemporary in Melbourne, a curl of tangerine peel lies on a shelf, its yellowing, pithy insides facing upwards. It looks as though it should be cleaned up, but it won’t be. The rind is not rubbish discarded by a careless visitor: it’s a perfect resin cast made by Armanious.

Placed carefully around the gallery are resin recreations of other items more commonly seen in bins: a group of melted candles, blobs of Blu-Tack, crumbly chunks of polystyrene. These might seem unlikely subjects for an exhibition, but Armanious is one of several artists who have turned their eye to trash in recent years. Gavin Turk, Ai Weiwei, Susan Collis and Glen Hayward, among others, all go to similarly painstaking – and often expensive – lengths to recreate items that most people would not look twice at. Trompe l’œil sculptures of rubbish have been exhibited in museums around the world and fetched high prices at galleries and auctions. In October, a pile of six garbage bags cast in bronze by Turk sold for £82,550 (roughly AU$167,000) at Sotheby’s in London.

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