Necklaces

Necklaces

Most plastic packaging is called “disposable” from “disposable” food containers, “disposable” lighters, but we know that everything disposable goes some where and that some where is for a long, long time.

By giving aesthetic form to what is considered to be garbage, I serve as both cleaner and curator. While the content of my work has a message about the spoiling of the natural world by the human/industrial world, my intent is to transform the perils of pollution into something beautiful and celebratory.

These necklaces were made from plastic collected from Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore. Irresponsible visitors did not leave this plastic on the beach; rather it washed up from the ocean. Some pieces show evidence of being at sea a long time, roughed and tumbled by the salt and the waves. Some have identifying markers indicating that it traveled far, from Korea or Japan.

I hope by putting a little fun and fashion into the conservation conversation, that the value of detritus will increase. Soon everyone will be out at the beach “shopping” for a special piece of plastic trash or will be eager to “mine” the North Pacific Gyre for plastic treasures. Then, we get some great things to wear and to look at, plus we get a clean and healthy sea.

Milk Tab Bracelet

When I was growing up, milk came in clear glass bottles delivered early morning to our doorstep. Years later, we bought milk at the store in a boxy wax carton with a fold open spout. Now, in the name of sanitation and convenience, milk cartons have been “improved” with plastic safety milk pull-tabs. Now, thousands of these ubiquitous tabs are making their way to the landfill. It will take thousands of years for them to decompose and go away.

To draw attention to this blight, I created a bracelet by looping one loop inside the other and on around until the final one loops into the first one. People always take note of my unique jewelry, which allows me to talk about plastic and encourage action about everything, even about milk cartons.

During a recent trip to Tanzania, I visited a Masai village where the inquisitive fingers of an elder Masai woman touched my bright white bracelet trying to figure out what could be the source and the material of my unusual adornment. I asked our guide to explain that I had made the bracelet out of milk pull-tabs; that they were something that would otherwise be thrown away; and that I am an artist who uses recycled plastic in my creations. I was babbling so fast that probably neither she nor my translator understood a word of what I was saying.

When she expressed interest in my bracelet I was thrilled. She is also an expert craftsperson who makes elaborate bracelets and neck collars. With mutual respect as artisans, we made an exchange. I now wear one of her fine beaded bracelets and she now wears my milk-tab bracelet. 

I imagine that when I am telling this story about my amazing experience with the elder Masai woman — she is telling someone about the crazy white woman who came into the village telling stories about recycling plastic? and milk cartons? I have to laugh, they subsist milk and blood from cows, might have never even seen a milk carton — so I was indeed crazy-talkin’.

In a gesture of appreciation of art and adornment, the Masai woman and I connected. ART held the moment — through beauty, we were able to speak when language just wouldn’t do.

NURDLES - the mermaid's tears

         In a telescopic to microscopic series of images, we present the near invisible story of nurdles, a particularly noxious component of the plastic flotsam. Nurdles are sometimes referred to by their more poetic name, “mermaid’s tears.” 

Nurdles are almost impossible to see until one learns what they are and how to differentiate them from a grain of sand or a fish egg. Once known, one sees numbers of them scattered across the sand. Nurdles are the raw plastic material that is shipped to manufacturers of bottles, car parts, toys, almost anything made of plastic. The real danger with nurdles is their absorptive capability. They are tiny magnets for metabolites, PCB's, breakdown products of DDT—DDE and other dioxin-like substances. They are poisonous little bombs loaded with tens of 1000's of times more poison than the ambient sea, and because they are translucent they are mistaken for fish eggs, they enter the food chain. 

We intend with this exposition to make big what we don’t see; to focus on our indiscriminate use of plastics. We are mining fossil hydrocarbons for heating our houses and workplaces, for driving our planes and trains and automobiles, and yet, we only vaguely understand that we are using much of the irreplaceable primordial remnants of Carboniferous fern bogs, laid down 300,000,000 million years ago, to make plastic that we so blithely toss away. 

Our work reflects our long held views about the purposes of art. Art can be beautiful and challenging. Art can be political without being polemical. We do what artists always do; reframe the context. Make something horrible beautiful, the "terrible beauty" Yeats speaks of. And, do it with all the joie de vivre artists can muster. Make it beautiful. For, after all, why try to help reshape the human tribe at all? Once we realize, not just know, but once we realize, what we have been given, it's time to celebrate. 

Bolinas Museum, 2008, Bolinas, CA

Plastic Bag Ban

In 2005, inspired by a Quinceanera gown, 120 San Francisco Chronicle newspaper delivery bags were gathered onto elastic bands to form the tiers of the ball gown. 

Burning Man is the place to make a statement, fashion or otherwise. So I donned my gown and danced the night and day away at Center Camp:

In 2007, my dream began to come true, when a city-wide plastic bag ban went in to effect on November 20, 2007. To celebrate, supporters and fashionistas held a plastic bag ban fashion show at 111 Minna Street. I walked the catwalk and won 2nd place.

Photo(s) by Luke Thomas Fog City Journal

Every year, weather or not, thousands of these bags are left at households in the City of San Francisco. Imagine what would happen if all of those non-recyclable bags were made from corn- based biodegradable compostable plastic and if they were only used on inclement days. That would be a real fashion statement!

The Party's Over

What we leave behind, what every creature, every culture leaves behind. What the rocks themselves leave behind. Paleontology, Archeology, Geology. All these sciences study the remains of something that happened in time, something that left a mark. We cannot see sub-atomic particles, but only know them by the shadows they cast in their swift passing. History itself looks into the archives of politics, art, literature; what was left. Cézanne's apples, Mozart's Magic Flute. The fossilized bones of the Archaeopteryx— the Ur bird. Strata of rock telling the tale of mountains in motion. The columns of Persopolis standing stark against the empty Persian Plain.

And now here, found once as a bright curiosity picked out of the buff strand the little popped things full of color once signifying transitions, birthdays mostly but you see 'em at weddings, at New Year's and most recently at the funerals of kids bumped off in car wrecks and fall guys from the AIDS plague, both dying too soon with a send-off that speaks of hope for a future never realized. As we kept finding them over the years of beachcombing, we couldn't help but think of these little things as marker buoys for the most acute passages that shape each life.

Joyous or grief struck, the limpid floppy remains are hardly mute. That they last a long time belies their notoriety for flimsy ephemerality. They sit, many with their ribbons still knotted on saying yes that was gone, and that was gone too. Finding all of them on one isolated beach- strangely fraught with the thrill of discovery. With a connoisseur’s eye, avaricious for the next and the next, collecting talismans of the tiny moments profound only by the very commonness of their token, little beacons of the life lived. 

Lunch

On February 26, 2005 we spent our lunch time at Crissy Field Beach. Our findings —what we 2 people collected in 90 minutes — were displayed at the Thoreau Center for Sustainability in EcoVisions: Bay Area Artists Exploring Global Ecological Issues curated by the WEAD board.

What you see here is what two people picked up during a ninety-minute lunchtime walk. This is not picnic litter; it is what washed ashore on a tiny beach, Crissy Field Beach, in the San Francisco Presidio. 

It is one beach among millions. 

The plastic is just a small part of the 46,000 pieces of visible plastic in every square mile of the ocean. 

That's all the oceans on our planet. 

We have mined the fossil hydrocarbons for heating our houses and workplaces, for driving our planes,  trains, and automobiles, and yet we only vaguely understand that at least 20% of these irreplaceable primordial remnants of Carboniferous fern bogs laid down 300,000,000 million years ago, are being used to make plastic that gets blithely tossed away. Tossed away in such quantity that today in the North Pacific Gyre, there is a raft of floating plastic the size of Texas, some even say the size of Brazil. We toss it away, blind to the implications.

What we do know is that if we fail to stop this mad rush to use it all up, industrialized, information-driven civilization will never rise up again. The Bronze Age was founded on metal that was easily mined with minimal effort, picked up off the ground. The Petroleum Age began with abundant oil seeping from the ground. Oil production has reached its peak and though we still have half the amount we started with, it is only reachable by a powerful infrastructure driven by oil itself. In other words, every drop of oil we extract now is twice as hard to get as it was 10 years ago, and it will be twice as hard 10 years from now. In other words, if we blow it this time, there will be no second chance. An industrial civilization will never again rise from "scratch."

What to do?

We are in charge; we can re-dream the system, using the most powerful force on the planet, the human imagination. There is no "they' who will solve the problem. Each individual has deep power to find solutions.