Sicko is a book that celebrates the design of airline sick bags and the man who’s collected them since 1989

When writer, filmmaker and documentarian Elizabeth McCafferty met Trevor Cunningham, she knew she was meeting one of the most interesting people she had ever met – and that’s saying a lot. In Elizabeth’s articles for The Guardian, The Independent, Vice and Dazed, she’s written about people who professionally toe-wrestle, a guy who eats pizza every day, hardcore food porn-stars and the creative teams behind kitty wigs.

What drew Elizabeth to Trevor was that he’d personally set up a support group called Ask Trev, a team of people exclusively called Trevor who are rewriting the negative connotations the name might be associated with, and it ended up the focus of a documentary Elizabeth made. But through her interactions with Trevor, she followed her insatiable curiosity and learned so much more about him than she could have anticipated, including his unique collection of sick bags nabbed from an array of airlines. Inadvertently, Trevor has been keeping the overlooked design history of sick bags alive – and his story is collected in Elizabeth’s newest book Sicko.

Trevor’s collection of sick bags is charged with sentimental value: when his 32-year-old boss Peter tragically passed away at work from a brain aneurysm, Trevor cleared out his desk draws and in the process, uncovered a collection of sick bags. What began as a small tribute to Peter has turned into nearly four decades of airline ephemera for the weak stomached. “The entire project is about memories and nostalgia, so creating anything outside of the analogue space felt too alien for such a strangely intimate project about someone’s relationship with loss; or a collection that spanned decades,” says Elizabeth. “The beauty of the sentimental aspect to Sicko helped convince me there was more to the story than a gimmick. There was heart and soul and a lot of character that I knew would be joyful to a lot of people.”

The book is hand typed on a 1970s typewriter, including hand-written diary entries from Trevor himself – the nostalgia and memories that flood from the book are punctuated by the analogue elements, including genuine vintage paper plane templates, old photographs and Kodak slides of planes that Trevor had been on. But most of all, these sick bags are indeed quite sick. They chart the analogue design choices (and the way that branding somehow finds itself in the most unexpected places) from China to the United States, sporting beautiful printed logo designs and uncomplicated layouts. One sick bag is advertising the 2005 videogame Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, another is a 1980s Qantas bag made in partnership with Kodak, so if one did not use it for an airborne vom, they could use it as a photo-development bag for their holiday (pretty genius if you ask me). “Now you’re lucky to even get a bag, let alone one that goes beyond just plain white paper,” says Elizabeth.

For Elizabeth, documentary is her life – it’s the perfect avenue for her genuine interest in life and all of its bizarre characters. Archiving is an extension of that lust for life, even if it’s trivial or disposable objects such as sick bags. Simply put: if one person loves sick bags, thousands of others probably do too. From Peter to Trevor to Elizabeth and finally: to us. As we continue to experience the “paperless future” we were promised in the 2000s, we find ourselves missing the strangest of objects. “Every single one of Trevor’s memories were sparked from him holding onto a bag and seeing what came to him. Ephemera is an important snapshot of history and whatever people collect, however trivial it might seem to someone else, is beautiful because passion is beautiful,” says Elizabeth. “While most people would throw an unused sick bag away without a second thought, Trevor’s remains as a sacred memory dedicated to living in the moment and embracing life after someone close to him died young; I feel we can all learn something from seeing beauty in something most other people fail to.”

Sicko is now available to be purchased from Elizaberth McCafferty’s online shop.