Under / Over: Is toilet paper actually one of design’s most worrying environmental problems?

While discussing a new exhibition, held at Marta in Los Angeles, its co-founder Benjamin Critton likens its message and contents to a children’s book, Everybody Poops. Written by Japanese author Tomi Gamo, the book details the toilet trips of each and every animal sweetly and calmly, until any anxiety surrounding the bathroom has settled in your stomach. “Not only is it a great children’s book,” Benjamin tells It’s Nice That, “but it’s literally true!”

Art and design, however, the area Benjamin and his co-founder Heidi Korsavong surround themselves in, rarely has this universally relatable quality. Objects of high design, the ones you’d expect to be featured in a gallery, often make most of us feel uncomfortable. Delicate pieces tend to accelerate your heartbeat both due to their beauty and a fear of breaking them. Other pieces feel so incomprehensible that, somehow, an actual object manages to make you feel slightly inferior. In almost all instances, its owner will be snooty and shout about its rarity.

One object which is difficult to get on your high horse about however is the focus of Marta’s new show – an exhibition of toilet paper holders.

The first unpacked in the show is the immediate environmental impact poorly considered toilet paper manufacturing has on our planet. “Toilet paper is an environmental disaster, it’s horrendous,” Benjamin explains to us. Tracing back the growing use of toilet paper to the 1900s, “after centuries of wiping variously with stones, sponges, sea-shells, and corn cobs,” toilet paper, as we know it, began to be “made of virgin tree-pulp, chlorine, and a host of other toxic chemicals.” Resultantly, the effects are un-shockingly alarming, from “27,000 trees flushed down the world’s toilets each day”, to the fact that each roll uses “37 gallons of clean water” – not to mention “over a gallon of bleach, formaldehyde, and other chemicals”.

One of the most alarming factors of our consumption is how absent-mindedly we each purchase toilet paper. Rarely does the average buyer heavily consider which brand to buy, especially in comparison to the careful consideration adopted with other products. “No one ever thinks ‘where does my toilet paper come from?’” adds Benjamin on this point. “In a city, it’s just something you buy at the corner store, and maybe in rural places, you’ll bulk up, but it’s not a conscious decision at the checkout line.” And, by not giving the product more conscious thought, we contribute to the political beliefs of its manufacturers too.

The fact that toilet paper’s consumer audience does include literally everyone in the western world is a point viewers will notice is played upon throughout the show. Pieces featured are each considerately made but wildly different, like Joseph Algieri’s crystal frosted to the wall design, Ryan Belli’s almost squidgy stacked edition, or off in another tangent is Peter Shire’s rainbow sheened toilet seat.

Receiving toilet paper holders from those commissioned in the post of the past few months, Benjamin describes that, in their “weird version of Christmas”, they’ve received only four or five holders which are more artistically leaning, whereas the rest are fully functional. “Lots of the pieces have an inherent humour to them, or have an inherent playfulness to them,” he explains. “Others, materially, are very serious – really beautiful pieces of what people may consider high design that just happen to hold a roll of toilet paper. It cuts at all these levels, and everyone finds their own angle.”

Each highly unique in context, texture and idea, Under / Over as an exhibition to some may be “just funny” (its title itself is a winking joke after all) but to others, it’s “funny and meaningful”, or even “dead serious and meaningful” as Benjamin describes. “Hopefully, it runs that full gamut.”

Under / Over runs through to 1 November, 2020, with timed exhibition spots available to book.