inspiration for YEAR of PLASTIC

This is a picture of the park I used to play in when I was in elementary school. It didn’t look like this then, but the trash layers were always just below the surface. It was so close that once my friends and I discovered we could unearth trash treasures by digging into the ground with sticks, it became routine in our playtime: part archeological dig, part adornment for our mud castles.

I later learned, they found toxic levels of pesticides in the soil and lead-ridden car battery casings; not an ideal environment for curious child archeologists. As it turns out, Mabel Davis Park, the one pictured here, was built on top of an old landfill, and the hole for this landfill was created by an even older quarry. Erosion exposed what was once buried and carried the toxins throughout my neighborhood by way of a stream. The park was considered unsafe for the public until 2005 after a massive cleanup using EPA brownfield funds.

This park has become a personal touchstone for how I understand environmental issues. If this is my baseline, what is the baseline for future generations? Am I complicit in creating the next landfill-playground?

I started research for my thesis exhibition in the summer of 2018. As I researched my park's history, China announced it would no longer import America's plastic waste. The landfill beneath my park didn't account for our modern relationship with plastic. It had been capped off at least 15 years before single-use plastics were widely accessible. This news narrowed my focus to single-use plastics, specifically my own use of them. Though I considered myself environmentally conscientious, I was also aware that convenience and availability shaped my consumption habits. But I needed to see the tangible results of my consumption, how much my household contributed, and to feel the physical responsibility for my own trash.

For one year, June 2018 - May 2019, I diverted all of the single-use plastic waste that was typically put in my recycling bin to my studio. I experienced how much water went into washing each piece, how much of my energy went into sorting and breaking down materials to store. I watched a shelf of plastic grow to bags and bags and eventually take over a corner of my studio.

I spent months just experimenting with this material, stringing together the rare successes to tease out meaning. Simultaneously I watched nature documentaries and pored over the photography of everything from microscopic cells to aerial drone perspectives of landscapes hoping to find relationships between the plastic sculptures I was making and the natural world. Sometimes I stumbled into a manipulation technique that resulted in something that looked natural, like how the fused produced bags from a particular grocery store looked like moss agate when layered up. I also pushed the material to do a certain thing because I was inspired by the natural form, like layering blueberry containers together to make a mushroom's underside.

The majority of my plastic collection is clear or translucent.

This means a finished piece is reminiscent of a ghostly sci-fi hologram of a natural form. A digital creation of something that is no longer there. A haunting warning of what can happen to the environment we are so dependent on. I conceptually exploit this quality by creating compositions that belong on the body. This is meant to disrupt our behavioral habits with single-use plastic, to use it once and discard without thought. To wear something means to exist with it and ideally treasure it. I want to create a pause to process how little time this material spends in our individual lives and understand how long-lasting its impact is on our environment.

It has been a year and a half since I formally stopped collecting my plastic, and yet that year’s worth continues to “provide.” I am currently working on a new collection of contemporary/conceptual jewelry inspired by eco-dystopian narratives using the bubblewrap collected during 2018.

That said, I am also changed. I can’t unknow the things I learned about how our “recycling” impacts other countries and the ways the plastics industry has made it more difficult to recycle, not less. While I assess and reassess my daily habits to get closer to a zero-waste household, I understand that this responsibility shouldn’t rest on our individual shoulders. The kind of change we need happens on a larger scale.

That is what I reach out to research now.