MP Your community initiative Trash Club came out of a specific Covid-related set of circumstances. What was it like building the initiative at that time, and how have you adapted? 

MN Trash Club was founded in 2021 as Trash Talk by me and Katy Mason, a multi-disciplinary practitioner and a really good friend of mine. It was not a pretty time. I had just finished my MA at Central Saint Martins and then went straight into lockdown. We felt there was a need for conversation because we felt very isolated and separated from the community we’d built. It began as an impromptu conversation on Clubhouse and developed from there. Last September, we hit 100 Trash Talks and we now do them every fortnight. As we started to gain more of an international following, we realised there was a need for the mission to grow beyond the Clubhouse conversations. We founded it as an organisation, and now we’re present in over 30 cities across the world. The Trash Club Hubs came about in early 2024 as an initiative to allow members to start their own physical spaces, and to have more nuanced, culturally specific conversations about their creative practices. Obviously, we all share experiences as creatives, but it’s different depending on where you are around the world. It’s been really exciting to see it evolve. 

MP I’m struck by the use of the word “trash”. 

MN We could have called it “Rubbish Club”, but “trash” is a more universal word that has many different meanings and variations. “Trash” can mean trash-talking or talking about literal trash. It’s slightly tongue-in-cheek, which we like because we often speak about very difficult, serious subject matter but in an accessible way. Another example of that would be the pillars we have: consciousness, responsibility, authenticity, and people, or “CRAP”. As Trash Clubbers, we live and work by those values, whatever those specific pillars mean to us. 

MP Your background is in sustainable fashion, but as Trash Club expands outward, it has come to involve people from across the arts. Why was connecting these different threads important for you? 

MN It was an organic process. When Katy and I had the first talk, it was more for our friends and our network and whoever wanted to join. Since then, we’ve realised that you don’t stop being creative after the “young creative period”. We have student memberships, we have people in school, we have graduates, we have people with really established careers. Whenever we ask somebody to describe themselves, there’s always a multi-disciplinary description. They might be an artist, but also an author, a lecturer, a photographer. We share similar journeys but come at it from different perspectives, understanding that the arts are holistic. It’s meant to be multiple.

MP What have been some of the challenges in translating Trash Club across the world? 

SM When we decided that Hubs were the way to go, I was adamant that I didn’t want them to be direct copy-and-pastes. Rather than me saying, “This is how you do it”, it’s been about monthly discussions with Hub hosts asking, “How can we change, and how can we connect and adapt?” Even things like the word “trash” or the word “club” don’t necessarily work in certain locations, so we’ve had to adapt the initiatives to work better in those spaces. In Shanghai, we translated Trash Talk to Tea Talk, because sharing tea is of cultural importance within that Hub. There are things you have to adapt to, but it’s really exciting to see.

MP  Across the lifetime of Trash Club, what changes have you observed in how we talk about art spaces? 

MN When I moved to London 13 years ago, there were a lot more working-class creatives such as myself in the arts. In London specifically, there was momentum when it came to sustainability in the fashion space, and it felt like a group within a larger community. When Covid-19 happened, it was difficult because we had to survive as human beings, but our practices had to survive as well. As we move into some sort of new normal, physical activations have been important. We can often feel like we’re in our bubbles as creatives, and especially when we speak about sustainability, social and environmental justice, you can feel like your practice isn’t doing much. We’re trying to collate everybody together and fight the huge organisations that are not talking about sustainability in the right way. 

MP You love finding small, hard surfaces to express yourself, as seen in your recent project making seashell candelabras. Tell me about the genesis of that, and how that has become another mode of expression for you. 

MN I’ve been sustainability lead lecturer for fashion design at Central Saint Martins for three years now. What I’ve realised having worked in academia for a while now is that within an institution, certain subject matters can only be spoken about within a certain time frame. You need time to build it into a curriculum and to get it approved, but with Trash Club, you can respond immediately. It’s a form of learning that is so responsive to what’s happening around us, in society, and around the world, and that’s so exciting to me. As a university student, you feel supported by people around you, but the opinions of your lecturers are not always relevant. Trash Club is a great space for people to come to, to feel like they have that support, and for people to ask around as they navigate their future selves in a world where community is more important than ever. .