Welcome to the world of plastics…

This is new for me, but an area I’m enjoying and will continue to explore.  After years of thinking about ways to be more environmentally conscious as an artist, I decided to stop using new materials to make art.  This was incredibly difficult considering I identify mostly as a painter and portrait artist.  I LOVE pastels and paint, but knowing that there is a ton of plastic just sitting doing nothing (except accumulating) made me want to search for ways to curb that.  I experimented a lot – sewing with plastic bags, dismembering and physically burning cds, and trying to morph many plastic bits into flat surfaces to then make into painting-like pieces.  I seemed obsessed with trying to make these bits into completely different formations, ones that I was either unskilled to do (because of the make up of the plastic), or didn’t have the equipment for.  I was always trying to change the shape of something that, like Forky, seemed destined to remain forever as it was formed.

One day, while I just sat in my studio looking at a discarded applesauce cup, the thought came to me to not try so hard to change it, but to leave it as is and change it only slightly.  For example, with that cup I left the shape intact and simply carved designs in the side with a soldering iron.  As I did this, many new revelations came to me about the possibilities of this new medium.  While I learned a lot, my current state of creation is one where I am much less concerned about having control over what I create, and more concerned about the process.  I stopped thinking like a painter and realized I became more of a sculptor, although I would describe myself as a mixed media artist.  The less I tried to make a “painting,” the more I enjoyed my work (and the more painterly they looked, ironically).

I use the term “white trash” because the creation of plastic resin is just as lacking in foresight as its current and future state: plastic as we know it was created by European inventor Leo Baekeland, simply so that he could make money.  I was advised by a friend that that term was actually a slur used against white people who associated with Black people – and I’m not making light or a joke of this term, to be clear.  I’m using it because I feel that plastics are a literal and metaphorical result of white capitalist culture that will affect us negatively for millennia.

Plastic bag sewing…

…then experimenting with ink…

…melting cds and chip bags…

…making my mom proud.

Below is what I have been able to create using plastic garbage, styrofoam and mistinted or returned paint (since it is generally stuff people do not want, I consider this keeping it out of landfill).