Gleaning

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After a discussion with Peter Allan on the 5/03/10 about my work, he suggested the idea of gleaning to frame my activity of using post production waste.
A good definition of gleaning and it's background can be found here, where this picture on the left was sourced from.
The correlation between what I'm doing and gleaning is very clear, and I think what I'm doing is staging a design intervention at the point when production waste would normally be discarded.  It means that there is a symbiotic, but dichotomic relationship between my manufacturing activity and the proposed design intervention.

To aid my understanding of gleaning, I watched Agnes Varda's documentaries on the subject - which I loved - more on that later.


I found Simon Lloyd's MA research titled gleaning potentials, which gives me some solid precedence in this area.  The major difference between Simon's and my work, is how he uses gleaning to source found objects in his surrounds, rather than from post production.  Of great interest to me is how he discovers the potential of the gleaned materials through their expression.  The reading of objects through their informative marks has relevance to looking at the properties of leather pieces as certain leather qualities relate directly to the animal from which it was sourced i.e. scars, stretchy belly parts.

This picture of "a typical skin with the best part of the leather outlined" is sourced from Parker, XL 1972, Working with leather, Scribner, New York, p21.
It illustrates how while the pic on the right has the best part shaded, perhaps it can be the area outside the outline - shaded in the pic on the left, that can be the "best" part.  How will I define what is "best" when it comes to leathery expression?