Each of Schmidt’s Trash Dolls combines refined, almost hyper-realistic coloured pencil representations with collaged elements of the ‘real thing’: crumpled bottle-caps, baggies, cigarette ash and blood spatters become indivisible from delicately rendered pencil drawings. The figures are composites of objects and goods emptied of value, husks of single-use instant gratification or perhaps compulsive addiction. Half-eaten sushi, battered Swarovski crystals and champagne corks mingle with discarded laughing-gas canisters, rusting razor blades and a range of pills and powders; these could be seen as the remnants of a life lived through commodity fetishism and dependency or the indicators of a night well spent.

Schmidt caricatures this distinctly urban cycle of consumption and waste with affection; the carnivalesque parade of living trash is underscored by a sense of personal intimacy. Every work is endowed with its own crop of human hair, ascribing a bodily specificity to each character. Emanating from friends, lovers, acquaintances and the artist herself, the hair - alongside droplets of blood, coffee stains and spattered beer - materialises intimate relationships in all their messiness and abject physicality. With tongue in cheek, Schmidt catalogues and reconstitutes the sediment of downtown parties and alley way trash heaps, injecting the surrealist wit of Arcimboldo with hedonism and sleaze.