In April, i saw and fell in love with Shay Alkalay‘s sweet Bin Bag Bear, teddy bears made of garbage bags.
At the RCA Summer show, the young designer was showing the utterly lovely (or slightly disturbing, according to others) Hoover Bear Bags, a cross between a hoover bag and a teddy bear. A bit like Jurgen Bey’s Dust Stool, the headless bears are filled with dust. For his serial project on turning waste into teddybears, he is plannning to work on Puking Bag Bears for flights, sawdust baskets for workshop sanders and grass baskets for grasschoppers.
He wrote a story for this project:
A simple employee at the council rubbish disposal services had a peculiar imagination: he could see teddy bears in every object he observed. As a child he would stare at the clouds imagining that he could see teddy bears in the sky. And today…everywhere, even the black bin bags looked like teddy bears to him.
No one at work could stand his excited cries every time he shouted ‘look at that bear…look at that one…don’t throw it into the garbage crusher. Nooooo!..’
Of course he was fired from his job, lost his family and friends and became homeless. Yet even though many people thought he was strange, none of them would admit that they too saw the teddy bear bin bags dumped around the streets of London.
More images, courtesy of Shay (except the blurry pictures, they are mine, unsurprisingly!).
Related: the Dustbunnies, Dusty Relief.