Refuse?REFUSE series - 2017/18
In creating the series of works Refuse?REFUSE, I want to create consciousness; I want people to think about how many plastic items they use once and then throw away. I want to create awareness of ways in which they may reduce it. I want to highlght how as a society we are unthinkingly careless with plastic and we are already paying a price.
Do you know how many zeros there are in a Trillion? - I didn’t. While I was investigating plastic pollution in our oceans, I kept coming up against these huge numbers that I couldn’t really comprehend. I looked it up - 12 zeros - that's huge and equates to mountains of toxic poison pills floating in our seas. The plastic pollution situation has grown out of control - the sea now hides trillions of micro plastics virtually unseen to the human eye, but it's being eaten by plankton and working its way up the seafood chain to our plates. We have barely reduced any of our plastic footprint since production began 50 years ago -- all we've done is merely pushed plastic trash into to our seas and landfill.
Images Refuse?REFUSE 1T -
I created the number one trillion 1,000,000,000 using straws and fish I’d bastardised with single use plastic. I wanted viewers to see the play between balance of ugly/beautiful. Will the tensions of pretty to squeamish haunt people enough to rethink their world?
Info source - https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/
141211-ocean-plastics-garbage-patches-5-gyres-pollution-
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/12/how-much-plastic-there-ocean