An interview with Pit Projects' Anni Hagberg and Michael Gittings
Pit Projects is an evolving site of creative collaborations between artists Anni Hagberg and Michael Gittings. The duo glean debris from illegal tips and roadside rubbish, transforming discarded materials into design-driven functional objects. For Future Ambition, they present Rubbish Works, a collection of functional objects – a pendant light, table lamp, side table and wall cabinet – created from discarded glass and metal salvaged from illegal tips in Melbourne’s west, along with roadside refuse – including a shattered glass bus shelter. Pit Projects challenge society’s rampant consumerism and widespread complacency – prompting us to engage with the immediate materials that are right in front of us, instead of searching for the new.
Tell us about the work that you are presenting for Future Ambition.
For Future Ambition, we will be presenting a collection of functional objects created from salvaged glass and metal, collected from illegal tips and roadside refuse. The collection will feature a pendant light, table lamp, side table and small wall cabinet, each comprising of textured kiln formed glass and welded steel, combined through classic copper foil and solder technique. The works are textured and irregular, drawing both their forms and their surfaces directly from the materials at hand - the glass panels cast into moulds of wet cardboard litter, and the steel textured by rust and lives of past use.
For you, what is the most pressing sustainability concern that you are addressing with your work?
From our perspective there appears a real lack of desire, propensity and/or ability to engage directly with our material surroundings that is playing out through the dominant cultural practices of the world right now. Coupled with rampant consumerism, we seem to adopt complacent and lazy approaches across many areas of our lives, ultimately resulting in unresourceful and unimaginative outcomes. Not only is this bleak from a sustainability perspective, it signals an increasing alienation from the material reality of our existence and, we think, a loss of creativity and joy.
Your work for this exhibition has involved sourcing discarded objects from illegal tips in Sunshine North, Melbourne. What was that experience like? What sort of objects did you discover, and what is your perspective on these sites?
Finding things is really fun - humans (like most organisms) love looking for and finding useful stuff. This feeling is much the same whether looking for a new purchase, prospecting for gold or digging through trash. Illegal tips are really sad places, of blatant disregard, disrespect and laziness. Ultimately, they are places defined by a lack of care; for the things we buy, what they are made of, how we use them, where they end up – as well as the civic and environmental systems that support the places we live. Together, for us, these impulses say a lot about human nature and our cultural habits.
"Working with found materials develops your material and technical skills in uniquely tacit way."
How has working with these materials led you to innovate and inspired your making processes?
Working with found materials develops your material and technical skills in uniquely tacit way. There is a lot of guesswork and application of knowledge from other areas that takes place when working with unknown material compositions and limited resources. This necessitates working with materials in an indeterminate manner, without complete control over exact outcomes. This way of working invariably results in unexpected discovery and new directions, something both highly generative and inspiring.
See Pit Projects' work in Future Ambition, 9 May – 21 June 2025.
Find out more about Conscious Craft – a movement to redefine our relationships with materials in a considered, responsible and responsive way.
