Bottles are at the top of our "hit list" of items we find every time we go to the beach. So over the years we have amassed hundreds, no thousands of these ubiquitous no-deposit, no return throw aways. Although there recycling messages aplenty only a small percentage bottles are actually recycled. Putting a bounty on the bottles is an idea that is long overdue.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of our friend and colleague Doug Woodring his Global Deposit Program is gaining traction. It's simple - PET has value, capitalizing on that value instead of throwing it away is kind to the environment plus it makes real economic sense. Reading about Doug's visionary project prompted us to put together this summary of how, over the years, bottles have been a recurring theme (not dream) in our artwork.
In 1992 Judith created SUCK, a powerful image of a baby bottle filled with cigarette butts, designed to speak to young women and children about the detrimental effects of smoking on infants and children. SUCK was exhibited in 1993 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the bus shelter kiosk as part of an experimental venue for artworks. HEALTH EDCO, a leading national distributor of health education products provides resource materials on drug, tobacco and alcohol abuse, nutrition, patient care and the healing arts. Since 1994, they have sold thousands of the SUCK posters through their catalog and online store.
Terroir (Tare-Wahr/French): A Sense of Place
At the Marin French Cheese Factory
7500 Red Hill Road, (the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road)
Petaluma, CA
March 20-June 21, 2009
WaterLily was made from 365 bottles in a visual representation of the quantity used by one person, one a day for one year. By floating groups of bottles (lilies) on the lake, Judith created a beautiful reuse of what otherwise would, hopefully, be recycled or might otherwise be trash. Those 365 bottles are a drop in the bucket compared to the 37 billion disposable plastic water bottles Americans use every year. All that consumption of bottled water is pretty astonishing given that in most parts of the country, tap water is not only perfectly safe, but is also more tightly regulated that its bottled counterpart. Only 23 % of the plastic bottles get recycled, the others end up in the landfill where it takes some 700 years before they even begin to decompose.
In the summer of 2009, Project Kaisei a team of innovators, sailors, ocean lovers, scientists, environmentalists, and sports enthusiasts traveled to the North Pacific Gyre to study the marine debris that has collected in this oceanic region. They were interested in processing techniques that could be employed to detoxify and recycle these materials into diesel fuel. Doug Woodring, project co-founder, describes the plastic collected during that expedition, “These samples are ‘like moon rocks.’” This precious evidence from the gyre confirms the horror that we have all suspected was true. There is debris, great quantities of it. The marine growth accretions on the plastic are evidence that the plastic has been at sea a long time. This bottle and shelf, direct from the gyre, were displayed at the Hayward Shoreline Interpretive Center in 2009 in our exhibition Disposable Truths.
Silent Spring, the book about pesticides and pollution by Rachel Carson published in 1962, launched the ecological movement. Judith was inspired by that influential book, and published in 2011 an empty plastic water bottle labeled Silent Spring to herald yet another environmental catastrophe. With the proliferation of the single-use plastic bottles a monumental ecological and health crisis loom. The shift away from drinkable tap water to bottled water creates mountains of needless garbage. The leeching of chemical compounds from the plastic into the water has unknown health consequences. The label on Judith's Silent Spring uses the original font and cover color from the first edition of Silent Spring. The bottle is displayed on a glass coaster with a collage of a dry lakebed and photographs of empty water bottles. “Silent Spring” is an apt description for the transformation of pure mountain spring water into a corporate-owned commodity, a silencing of the source.
In 2012 the Palo Alto Art Center sponsored On the Road, a series of temporary site -specific installations. For that program Judith was commissioned to create a larger version of Water Lilies to float near Byxbee Park in the Baylands Nature Preserve.
Water Lilies opened April 8 with a reception on Earth Day April 22 and floated in the Baylands until August 14. Thanks to an intrepid team of assistants more 1,000 recycled single-use plastic bottles were glued together to make the pads. While the volume of bottles in this sculpture is significant, it represents only a small fraction of the more than 37 billion plastic water bottles American use every year.
In the Spring of 2013 we were commissioned to create a permanent installation for the Oakland Museum, Natural Science Gallery. Our ceiling piece The Great Conveyor represented the ocean currents as the great conveyors bringing us debris from all around the Pacific Rim. Single –use bottles and bottle caps are among the most common items found in the ocean waste stream. They come to our beaches, from our neighborhoods and from thousands of miles across the sea, connecting the world in swirls of single-use plastic. On the top of each cap is a small round mirror to reflect back that we are a part of every choice we make has a consequence. Recycling helps, but reduced use is the real answer.
For the activity station we curated a collection of bottles arranged like a specimen drawer in a natural science museum. Hey!!! this is a natural science museum. On Kehoe Beach we find telltale product labels from Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, even Russian. And our bottles from the San Francisco Bay end up on distant shores.
This time lapse film tells the epic story of the many bottles and the many hands that made creation of the Stanley Bay Water Lilies possible.
There is an undeniable beauty in the bottles as in these arrangements we photographed and printed for Cavallo Point Lodge in Sausalito, CA. Every guest room in this lodge at the restored historic Fort Baker has one of our prints. View the collections here.
It is surprising that after all of these these years we have found only one message in a bottle in 2000 just before the presidential election — the scrawled note, a political message said gush v. bore — got that right!
or maybe after all of the years the bottles are the message.
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