Joe Hodway is a London-based contemporary painter whose practice uses carefully selected post-consumer and post-industrial commercial acrylic and vinyl-based emulsion paints.
Close to 100% of the paint incorporated into his work is salvaged rather than purchased. His substrates are composed primarily of hardboard, cradled with fast-growing spruce softwood frames and covered in tightly stretched canvas. These heavily engineered supports provide the robustness necessary to sustain the physicality of his painting processes, while the wood-based components constitute the principal biogenic carbon store within the physical artwork.
For Hodway, the reuse of materials is not simply an environmental strategy. It has become an integral part of his methodology and a fundamental component of his investigation into materiality, transformation, impermanence and the relationships between matter, energy and identity.
PAINTS
Close to 100% of Hodway’s paints are salvaged from three principal sources:
- Fly-tipping of building and trade waste in his immediate locality.
- Municipal waste disposal facilities, including Veolia’s Integrated Waste Management Facility in Southwark.
- Post-industrial sources, including directly from manufacturers and retailers such as Crown and Farrow & Ball.
A proportionately negligible amount of paint comes from other post-consumer sources, including donations of unwanted or surplus materials from artists and makers working in the 550 studios at Thames-Side Studios’ Woolwich site, where Hodway’s own studio is located.
Rather than purchasing new paint specifically for the production of his work, Hodway carefully selects, sorts and tests discarded materials according to their physical properties and suitability for incorporation into a painting. Materials are not selected simply because they are described as waste; they must first be viable for incorporation into a finished artwork.
Old emulsions in particular can become too degraded to be suitable for archival purposes. Consequently, all salvaged paints are meticulously vetted before incorporation into his works. Matt emulsion paints can have unstable surfaces once dry and are stabilised with a subsequent application of a consolidator composed of dilute clear polyurethane or acrylic varnish when necessary. These materials are also post-consumer and obtained from the same sources as his paints. Eggshell, silk and gloss finish emulsions are generally more durable, with properties comparable in some respects to artists’ acrylics.
SUPPORTS AND TEXTILES
Hodway sources timber from reputable timber merchants, builders’ merchants and DIY stores in the vicinity of his studio, including B&Q. He only selects wood-based products carrying PEFC or FSC certification on their product labels. PEFC and FSC are international forest certification systems that provide frameworks for responsible forest management and the traceability of timber-based products through supply chains. Hodway retains the certification information associated with the materials used in selected works as part of their material provenance.
The spruce and hardboard components constitute the principal biogenic carbon store within the physical artwork. Sourcing materials locally also reduces, but does not eliminate, the transportation distances, costs and associated emissions.
Finding suitable reclaimed textiles for use as painting surfaces presents a greater practical difficulty. While Hodway has experimented with salvaged and upcycled textiles, the majority of his works are currently made using 12oz artist canvas sourced from Whaleys of Bradford. This remains an area in which the constraints of material availability are acknowledged rather than obscured.
This limitation remains part of the ongoing methodology. Where a genuinely suitable reclaimed or upcycled alternative cannot be obtained, conventional artist-grade materials are used rather than compromising the physical requirements or longevity of the work.
WHY HE USES THEM
Prior to 2020, Hodway had been incorporating small amounts of salvaged paint and upcycled textiles, including canvas from ex-army tents, into his work.
The formal integration of material reuse as a foundational aspect of his methodology began during the COVID-19 lockdowns, in response to builders and tradespeople illegally dumping surplus materials near his home. With many municipal disposal sites closed or operating under restrictions, local green spaces became hotspots for fly-tipping.
The council periodically collected the waste using compacting refuse lorries, making it unfeasible to separate the recyclable elements, and disposed of it by incineration at their partner facility SELCHP (South East London Combined Heat and Power).
When incinerating polymers such as acrylic and vinyl, many dangerous compounds including dioxins are generated. Most are industrially captured during the process. The resulting Air Pollution Control (APC) residues are classified as hazardous waste due to their content of heavy metals, salts, and trace organic compounds. The captured hazardous solids are sent to landfill. Regulated pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and greenhouse gases are still continuously released into the atmosphere during the combustion process. Over much longer timescales the hazardous materials sent to landfill have the potential to enter soil, water and consequently biological systems.
Living relatively close to SELCHP, Hodway became particularly conscious of this continuity. Discarded materials, including those routinely consumed by artists, tradesmen or domestic consumers, do not simply vanish when they are incinerated or sent to landfill. The discarded paint continues through different environmental systems, ultimately becoming part of the wider material environment and, consequently, the organisms within it, including us.
He set himself the challenge of harvesting and repurposing viable materials from consumer and trade waste for two principal reasons:
- To minimise the environmental footprint of his own practice by reducing his consumption of virgin materials and the associated impacts of their manufacture, transportation and disposal.
- To divert viable materials from conventional and potentially harmful waste streams by returning them to productive use as materials for making art.
It was a difficult challenge. The self-imposed restrictions meant that he could no longer simply obtain whatever colour he wanted. Most of the recovered paints were white or magnolia, with relatively few vivid colours apart from occasional blues and yellows. These constraints consequently exerted a direct influence on the palette of his paintings during this period.
As lockdown restrictions eased, the volume of fly-tipping reduced ,and Hodway was forced to find other sources of paint to sustain this methodology. He turned to local municipal disposal and recycling facilities, DIY shops, paint retailers and manufacturers for unsalable, old or damaged stock.
Many of these organisations were willing to provide materials that would otherwise have incurred disposal costs. Some subsequently organised the collection and delivery of unsalable paints from other locations within their networks, bringing them directly to Hodway’s studio.
These relationships with the paint trade provided access to a much greater range of colours and, in many cases, higher-quality materials than those recovered from disposal sites. It was a win-win result for everyone involved. What began as a response to the environmental and economic consequences of material waste developed into an increasingly sophisticated system of material recovery and reuse.vered from disposal sites. It was a win-win result for everyone involved. What began as a response to the environmental and economic consequences of material waste developed into an increasingly sophisticated system of material recovery and reuse.
CONCEPTUAL SIGNIFICANCE
The transformation of Hodway’s materials prompted a similar reevaluation of the focus of his work. During his BA in 1998, his primary focus was identity and the symbols and iconography that embody and communicate it, particularly institutional and geopolitical symbols. This developed from his multinational heritage, exposure to military and institutional insignia, and the influence of commercial branding and mainstream media.
Subsequent experiences, including a parallel career as a graphic designer specialising in corporate branding, time spent living in a Tibetan monastery, gender changes within his immediate family, personal study of cosmology and particle physics, and growing awareness of the environmental consequences of unsustainable global consumption, combined with his new material methodology to produce a shift in his understanding of the relationships between identity, matter, energy, transience and permanence.
“It was like the materials were talking to me, and telling me their histories and aspirations. These paints started off as hydrogen nuclei about 180 seconds after the Big Bang. Their atoms had evolved through countless iterations, becoming parts of stars, supernovas, comets, and eventually wound up here on Earth as components of prehistoric phytoplankton, algae, and microscopic marine animals such as zooplankton that fed on them. Through millennia of immense heat and pressure, these primordial cousins of ours became mineral oil. This was extracted, refined and processed by humans into the paints now before me.”
Paint has its own material history. Pigments, binders, minerals, polymers and other constituent substances have passed through biological, geological and industrial processes before arriving in the studio. Once discarded, those materials do not cease to exist. They enter another phase of their material history. Their histories became something Hodway could associate with:
“As the incumbent regimes were replaced (sometimes violently,) my mother and her family were forced to flee their jobs and homes in Iraq, and subsequently Iran, and then India, as refugees before settling in the U.K. The transitions between location and role, each necessitating new integrations and adaptations, has profound implications for the perception of national, cultural, and personal identity.”
As he continued working with the materials, their histories began to connect with his own understanding of matter and identity:
“The paint and I, and everything and everyone around us, were simply combinations of continuously exchanged reconfiguring matter and energy. The perceived boundaries between the materiality of our identities and our environments were inescapably porous.”
The use of reclaimed materials operates on more than one level. What began as a primarily sustainability-driven exercise has evolved into a foundationally symbolic component of Hodway’s work, echoing not only the alchemical transmutation of materials in the art making process, but the repurposing and transformation of matter and energy on molecular, biological and cosmological scales.
Hodway positions his current work as a contemporary successor to 17th Century Dutch Vanitas paintings, informed by contemporary science in place of religious canon.
As with the Dutch masters, fidelity to surface detail is given considerable importance. In contrast however, objects symbolising wealth, culture, and knowledge are replaced by a single flat surface with graphic livery, suggesting industrial or geopolitical insignia. These symbols, often derived from emblems on international shipping that pass his studio, in turn allude to corresponding resources and influence. Instead of grinning skulls and wilting flowers, layers of exposed paint and rust-like marks allude to the accumulation of experience, decay, and the transition from one state to another.
“Material reuse has become both the means by which the paintings are produced, and part of what the paintings are about: transformation of identity rather than disappearance. Continuity rather than permanence, and the continual movement of matter and energy between different states.”
ENVIRONMENTAL CHARITY CONTRIBUTIONS
Joe Hodway continues working towards a net-zero-waste studio and donates 10% of the sales proceeds he receives to ecological charities to help mitigate the remaining environmental impact of his studio practice.
Total charity donations to date: £448.05