I am often asked how I came up with name, Waste Hazard.
Waste Hazard came to me in the year of 2018 during an incredibly tumultuous time in my life. I had, in sense, lost my marbles and felt like I was floating away from my own reality. During this time I started therapy as a means to ground myself back to Earth.
In session, I uncovered behaviors about myself that presented a danger to my well being and could only understand all of it as waste accumulated from my experiences and poor choices. Waste is an accumulation of the machine functioning - but it needs to go somewhere. Like the blood from a woman's menstrual cycle, or the exhaust of an engine. The waste must go somewhere. So I decided to put that waste into a art world called Waste Hazard.
Every day, I gathered the toxicity that consumed me and disposed of it into color, form, text and photography. The work became a release, a place for thoughts and experiences that felt too difficult to carry on their own.
As time passed, I started to embody Waste Hazard as an identity of its own. An alter ego. A name I could hide behind when I wasn't ready to be fully seen but wanted to express shared experiences. It created distance between myself and the work, while allowing me to reveal more than I otherwise would have.
The work became a home for the things I struggled to make sense of. The conversations that lingered long after they ended. The fantasies better left unsaid. The mistakes, obsessions, desires, and contradictions that followed me home. The parts of myself I wanted to conceal, and the parts that demanded to be shared so others could feel seen.
Over time, Waste Hazard stopped functioning as a mask and became a framework through which I could examine both myself and the world around me.
For years, I only wanted to be known as Waste Hazard. Everything felt as though it flowed through that name. In 2025, something shifted. Anthoula and Waste Hazard began to separate.
Some pieces now feel distinctly mine. Others still feel as though they belong to Waste Hazard.
The boundary between artist and alter ego remains imperfect. Where Anthoula ends and Waste Hazard begins, I'll leave for you to decide.
