At the end of my visual art degree, I had the opportunity to work as an artist in the Melt Collective lab for the end of my visual art degree. I came to the lab with loose ideas about recycling plastic bags, however it turned into a 6 month working relationship where I got to experiment with all sorts of plastic the engineers there were recycling into a new resource. I continued my project, experimenting with melting plastic bags, and molding them into new forms, however I also brainstormed and prototyped other uses for the plastics they were recycling. At the end, I built an archway using bricks made from about 10,000 plastic bags.
This work was nominated by the UBC Fine art department for the Bank of Montreal 1st ART! competition.
Artist statement from the exhibition where the archway was presented:
I am fascinated by the way in which stuff is created and consumed in the modern digital world. Simultaneously, we create physical and digital waste at an unprecedented scale, the ubiquity of the internet and smartphones means digital content is continually produced even more on an individual scale. Every minute, 216,000 photos are shared on Instagram, there are 1.8 million likes on Facebook, and three days worth of video is uploaded to YouTube–while this can be exciting, I find it overwhelming. To overcome this, I try and to create something out of this orgy of production. My materials are both the products and by-products of this hyper-productivity: They range from everyday discarded detritus, to the heaps of digital comments shared every second throughout, to the boundless netscapes of personal websites and blogs. In the case of 1000 Plastic Bags or So, I set out to construct from the waste products I see around me everyday.
