In the winter of 2000 the project space at Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station was offered to us for an exhibition centered on environmental issues. We decided to show what we could pick up from Kehoe Beach in one year. One Beach, One Year. We had the title before we had any plastic to speak of. With the pressure of a looming deadline, the picking began in earnest. We carried away at least 50 pounds of plastic each trip. A year of this and the pile had grown to over a ton. As our categorization became more rigorous and refined, the clarity of our artistic vision was focused on familiar things. Ordinary things that people touched every day.
Our collecting led to the discovery of multitudes of translucent sabots or wadding—the multi-petaled plastic florets tucked into shotgun shells to keep the BB's constrained, making a coherent pattern as they fly out of a gun muzzle. They were mostly translucent, but we’d find them in all colors. These sabots, shot into marshlands by bird hunters, come down the waterways and are flushed out in to the ocean before being washed back up on the beach. As we found more and more of them—we’d have over a hundred after a typical day of collecting—we wanted to express the awe we felt in finding so many. At first, we thought of a wall mandala made of a thousand sabots, but it morphed into a Spiral Nebulae seven feet across, a galaxy, a gyre, a focal point for One Beach, One Year.
