If our phone breaks, we buy a new one, a new trend appears, we follow it and plastic bottles? We get through a shed load of them! OK, so we’re casting a sweeping generalisation with this statement but realistically, this is a pretty accurate view of the throw-away society we now live in.  Even our love life hasn’t escaped this disposable ethos, with thousands now deciding the fate of their love life by a quick swipe left or right. It’s this culture which comes under the microscope in an upcoming exhibition at Northern Monk from a group of interdisciplinary, creatives going by the name of Goat Collective.

Originally formed in their first year of university at Leeds College of Art, this creatively driven bunch decided to club together, realising the potential which collaboration between their various disciplines could bring. From photography to typography, graphic design to screen printing. If you need something doing, it’s a sure bet one of the Goats will pop out of the woodwork to help.

“We were a group of friends who are all really talented and all really good at what we do, everyone has their individual talents,” explains Dan.  “It was a bit like, well seen as we all already friends and enjoy each other’s company, we might as well combine all of that.”

Just like any other kind of family with hectic schedules, there are periods where the group are dispersed across cities, projects and events, but when the Goat call cries all eight come together.
This family of socially aware and ethically conscious creatives, have already established their name within the Leeds art circles through an ongoing artist residency with Hyde Park Book Club as well as other projects but are now taking the tentative steps into curating their very first exhibition, “Disposable Society.”

Goat Collective sent a call out to artists of all mediums across the city, asking them to give their interpretation of a brief which aims to shine a light on the critical view of over-consumption and excessive production of short-lived and disposable items.

“The tag line is ‘the throw-away world that we live in now a days.’ The disposable culture, society, everything is very single use, but that can be interpreted in so many different ways,” Says Rees, filmmaker of the group.
“There’s the obvious environmental aspect of it but you can look at society itself, the instant gratification of social media… tinder for example. We purposefully left it very open to see how people responded differently to is.”

“We’ve had lots of environmental pieces,” adds Dan, “but for instance I’m doing my piece on the homeless issue and talking to homeless people, getting their names down and their words of wisdom. People dispose of them as if they aren’t people, like oh yeah it’s just a guy out on the street but that is the disposable society we live in, burying it’s head in a different way.”

“The tag line is ‘the throw-away world that we live in now a days.’ The disposable culture, society, everything is very single use, but that can be interpreted in so many different ways,” Says Rees, filmmaker of the group.
“There’s the obvious environmental aspect of it but you can look at society itself, the instant gratification of social media… tinder for example. We purposefully left it very open to see how people responded differently to is.”

“We’ve had lots of environmental pieces,” adds Dan, “but for instance I’m doing my piece on the homeless issue and talking to homeless people, getting their names down and their words of wisdom. People dispose of them as if they aren’t people, like oh yeah it’s just a guy out on the street but that is the disposable society we live in, burying it’s head in a different way.”

With a brief which is so widely open to interpretation, the submissions so far have been extremely varied, ranging from documentaries on the dying art of tailors to a photographer taking images of adults with toys they once loved as a child. The group explained that it’s this variety and diversity which is what pushed the group to open the brief to anyone in the city:

“It’s something which is so applicable to everyone’s lives. It’s something everyone has something to say about it. When we send the brief everyone is like ‘oh we could do this…’it seemed like the perfect thing to get lots of people involved in and get lots of different viewpoints.”