Blog & insights

From the Gutter to the Gallery: Meet the Norwich Artist Turning Litter into Legacy

Walk down almost any street in Norwich and you'll see it: a flattened can kicked into the gutter, a stray bottle cap, a torn scrap of fabric snagged on a fence. Most of us step over it without a second thought. Calum Seeley picks it up.

The Norwich-based artist has built a striking body of work out of exactly the kind of things the rest of us try not to notice discarded objects and street litter, gathered on foot and by bike across Norwich and its neighbouring towns, then transformed into paintings that are as much archaeology as art.

"I create paintings from discarded objects and litter found in the streets of Norwich and neighbouring cities," Seeley explains. But the rubbish, he's quick to point out, wasn't always the point. "Rubbish crept into my work naturally, without me making the formal decision to. It began with leaving in waste materials of my painting process, like tissue, broken brushes, pencil shavings, and empty paint tubes." From there, his gaze turned outward from his own studio floor to the streets outside it.

What makes Seeley's process so compelling isn't just the materials it's the meaning he finds in them. "Knowing that all these objects once interacted with someone, and weren't important enough to stick around in their lives," he says. "Someone left them there."

That idea of objects as quiet witnesses to lives Seeley will never know  shapes everything about how he works. He doesn't plan his pieces in advance. Instead, he lets the streets decide. "I tend to find a location to work from that interests me, then search for the rubbish to create what I'm going to create," he says. "However it can work both ways I just wait until I find something that sparks my interest, and go from there."

The results are deeply personal, sometimes painfully so. One of his pieces, *St Andrews St*, was made during a break-up, built not from street litter but from the physical remnants of a relationship among them the handle of a commercial fryer basket, fabric scraps and zippers from a discarded tent, and old car floor mats. "It was the best way to cope at that time," he admits, "rather than using rubbish collected from the streets."

Seeley traces some of his comfort with chaos back to his upbringing. "An experience that influenced my work was growing up in a very messy home," he says. "Being unfortunately very comfortable in a messy environment made it very easy for me to transfer all the physical mess in my home, to physical mess in my paintings."

His biggest artistic influence is the German artist Anselm Kiefer, whose use of raw, natural materials straw, clay, ash, shellac  first pointed Seeley towards a tactile, materials-led way of working. It's a connection that runs deep enough that, asked who he'd most like to collaborate with, living or dead, his answer doesn't hesitate: Kiefer. "The mix of organic material and inorganic litter, I think, would result in a visually interesting and meaningful outcome," he says. "I'd also love to see his methods and processes while working so large."

Seeley is candid about how much control he gives up in his process  and how physically demanding it can be. Without a car, gathering enough material means long stretches of walking and cycling across the city, which he says "takes a big physical toll" on his body. Then there's the simple, unglamorous problem of storage: "It's easy to run out of space to keep things when stockpiling rubbish."

But it's precisely that loss of control that defines his work, especially when litter becomes the canvas itself rather than just a decoration on top of it. "The sizing, weight and how the texture of the object interacts with paint are out of my control," he says. "So I have to adapt my approach and let the rubbish dictate the outcome." When a piece won't cooperate, Seeley doesn't abandon it easily. "My ideas can be very malleable and will bend with whatever obstacle the rubbish throws at me. But at the end of the day, I can just recycle any material if the piece is actually unsaveable."

There's a deliberate strategy behind Seeley's choice of materials, too. "I try to use litter and items in a clearly recognisable way to deliberately trigger the 'I know I've dropped one of those before' feeling in some people," he says. It's a quiet nudge at our collective disposable habits flattened cans, bottle caps, vape lids, food packaging the everyday debris "all things that are really easy to keep in your pocket/car or hold until you reach a bin."

As Seeley puts it, "'Out of sight, out of mind' is a very common mindset when talking about litter and waste however artists can change this. Using discarded single-use items to create paintings that'll last generations will inevitably bring eyes upon this topic."

Seeley's practice is inseparable from his home city. Norwich's architectural sweep from Victorian terraces to brutalist concrete feeds his eye, but it's the people of Norwich who really shape his output. "They dictate the outcome of my work massively with the litter that is dropped," he says.

He's equally passionate about Norwich's creative scene, praising spaces like St Saviour's Yard and the Undercroft Gallery for supporting emerging artists, even as he acknowledges there's further to go. "Although it sits as one of the top 10 creative cities in the UK in 2026, I still think the creative community is fairly underground," he says, calling for more affordable studio space and greater public engagement with the city's art scene. He points to Peterborough's use of empty shop windows as temporary exhibition spaces as a model Norwich grappling with its own closing storefronts  could learn from.

Looking ahead, Seeley wants to scale up: bigger objects, sculptural work, even welding. And in his most ambitious reflection, he speaks of wanting to travel to Gaza, where an estimated 82% of buildings have been damaged or destroyed by years of conflict, to create work from rubble and rubbish "containing such significance to people's lives."

For an artist whose entire subject matter is waste, sustainability isn't an afterthought it runs through his working methods too. Seeley makes a point of selecting responsibly sourced paper and framing, painting with non-toxic paints, and reusing old canvases and paper wherever he can. Even the smallest habits matter to him: "A simple one not pouring your paint brush water down the sink; let it dry and throw it out."

It's a philosophy that extends to how he talks about materials generally. One of his most striking pieces, *'The Silver Slipper'*, is built around nothing more glamorous than a road sign proof, in his eyes, that value isn't fixed, it's assigned. "Traditional media like paint and ink aren't everything," he says. "Even if you gather a pile of rubbish, with intention and meaning, you're an artist."

Like most artists, Seeley's path to public recognition wasn't instant, and it wasn't without doubt. "I've always had that creative spark and always wanted to be an artist, but never thought it was a possibility," he admits. "It took a lot of encouragement from past teachers and other artists for me to take that leap."

That leap led to his first exhibition: the Shelter Norfolk 30th Anniversary Exhibition in 2025 a milestone made sweeter by a small, personal detail. "My dad helped me hang up my painting for my first exhibition," he says.

If there's a single message Seeley hopes people take from his work, it's a modest one. "I'd hope that viewers will come to the realisation that it's the little things that count," he says  a nod to how much of the litter he collects is small enough to slip through the cracks of everyday attention: flattened cans, bottle caps, vape lids, scraps of packaging. Objects nobody would think twice about, until they're arranged on a canvas and impossible to ignore.

Asked to sum up his work in three words, Seeley doesn't overthink it: Messy. Transformative. Tactile.

It's a fitting summary for an artist who has built a career convincing us to look twice at what we've thrown away  and, in his own words, offers one simple piece of advice to anyone inspired to follow suit: "Don't be embarrassed to pick up that piece of rubbish carry it home!"

Calum Seeley's work is available to buy exclusively through Urban Art Store UK in Norwich.

So next time you drop something in the street without thinking twice  a can, a wrapper, a bottle cap  ask yourself: what story might it go on to tell?