Her summer goal? Visit as many Ontario beaches as possible (and bring home a load of trash)

Every weekend of the summer, Jill Price goes to the beach. She's not there to splash in the lake or picnic on the sand. No, this artist has work to do. Dirty work. 

Price is from Barrie, Ont., and for the last several months, she's been leading clean-up events at beaches in the area. Her calendar is currently booked through early fall. Every Sunday through Oct. 12, Price will visit a different spot around Lake Simcoe, and volunteers are encouraged to register online to join the action. At a typical meet-up, she and her crew will comb the sand, bagging as much trash as they can find. "I get a lot of thank yous," says Price, whose efforts are often mistaken for a community service sentence. 

When the work is done, Price disposes of the trash. But first, she looks for treasure. Lost socks, styrofoam, coffee cup lids — anything white-ish in colour. Those are the bits she saves and cleans — and prepares for public consumption.

Earlier this month, Price opened a solo exhibition at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie. From There to Here: Walking for Tomorrow assembles all of the junk Price has collected to date, minus the spoils of her most recent beach cleans. Her entire collection fits on 12 storage racks, she says. "There's got to be 200 pieces of garbage on each shelf," and those surfaces are lined with plastic spoons, dental flossers, water pistols — all carefully arranged "in an archival, museological way."

In the gallery, the effect is gently confrontational. "A lot of people take trash and make stuff with it," says Price, but in her opinion, the act of transforming waste to produce an upcycled artwork often misses the point. A statement on material excess can be less effective if the piece is grand or beautiful — or simply unrecognizable from its source. "It disguises the patterns of consumption," she says. 

"The garbage of today is the archeology of the future," she says. "By letting the garbage remain as garbage, I'm letting people see the past, the present and ultimately the future."

The items appearing at the MacLaren Art Centre don't just come from the shores of Lake Simcoe. Wherever Price travels, she makes room in her suitcase for beach junk. She's done cleans in Curaçao, the Netherlands and the Azores. "[It] is becoming a personal archive. I'm now the caretaker of this trash." Back in Ontario, she's gone as far afield as Sudbury and the Toronto Islands — which is where the project began.

In the summer of 2024, Price was doing an artist residency there. The island park is something of an urban oasis for locals and tourists, who arrive there by ferry, kayak and water taxi. But while taking a walk by the lake, Price was stunned by the condition of the sand. "I noticed how many sharp objects there were — how dirty it was," she says. "People were sitting and tanning amongst garbage.… The lifeguards: their chairs were surrounded by refuse." It was like nobody noticed the mess except her. She felt compelled to do something about it.

"I found myself on the beach, cleaning it all week," she says. "I'm a guest here, right? And I'm trying to leave it better than how I found it." 

The garbage of today is the archeology of the future.- Jill Price, artist

When Price arrived on the island, she was already carrying that mantra with her. The year prior, she'd completed a PhD in cultural studies at Queen's University, and much of her research focused on the waste created through the art industry. "[I was] really thinking about my own responsibility as an artist — to not be part of the problem, to be part of the solution."

As she removed bottle caps and take-out trays from Ward's Island Beach, she reflected on that mission and how it connected to the effects of colonialism and her reality as a guest and settler. Every piece of garbage makes an impact, no matter how small. When a plastic bottle breaks down, for example, its toxins seep into the earth and water. "We end up consuming it in some way," says Price. "I was thinking about all of those things as I was starting to clean the beach."

When her residency came to an end, Price decided to continue her new art practice at home. "I needed to treat the territory in which I live and work with as much respect," she says. That fall, Price led a series of beach cleans around Barrie, where she involved members of the community. "Well, I figured that one person can't do it all," she says, laughing. 

As the saying goes, many hands make light work — messy as it may be. And when she's able to attract a crew of volunteers, the sight of folks cleaning the beach inspires more people to engage with what she's up to — both at the lake and in the art gallery. Price says that some of her younger volunteers have come out to the MacLaren Art Centre to hunt for the stuff they salvaged from the beach. "That's been great — getting them into an art exhibit and thinking about art in a different way, like art as service." 

The show is there through Oct. 26 and Price will be leading a series of events at the gallery, including a cyanotype workshop where participants will make prints using the bits and bobs collected on her beach cleans.

She continues to publicize her public clean-up events online, but even on Sundays when nobody shows up, Price dutifully tends to the shoreline alone — filling her bucket with paper cups, seltzer cans and a never-ending abundance of cigarillo filters.  

"To me, it would seem very superficial if I was just doing it for the show," she says. "It's one thing to do something for an exhibit. It's another thing to just do it because it needs to be done."

Jill Price. From There to Here: Walking for Tomorrow. Maclaren Art Centre, Barrie, Ont. To Oct. 26. www.maclarenart.com