Aiysha Alli

My initial research was heavily influenced by the documentary ‘Drowning in Plastics’ and the accelerated growth in demand for the need for landfills, so much so that in Low Income Countries (LIC) villages close to government-built landfills are creating their own smaller landfills to keep up with demand for recycling in their community, noticeably in Indonesia. These smaller landfills are not regulated, not safe and in fact are a danger to all lives close by. These landfills effect water flow, vegetation and land. The repercussions of such self-made landfills can be seen in water habitats and ecosystems in countries such as Australia, New Zealand and California where their once thriving coral reefs are breaking down and are being killed. It takes the ocean 450 years to break down the plastic seen in landfills but during this time, these single-use plastics transport diseases and viruses harmful to coral reefs. (Whiting, 2018). The fact that the plastics we once used, end up in landfills and are a significant contributor to the degrading of coral reefs by being a facilitator for viruses and diseases is very shocking. Whilst researching about this further, I came across pictures of plastics intertwined with coral reefs and coral even growing through/out of these plastic pieces. This visual picture was used to guide my material exploration. (Murray, n.d.) During my material exploration, I came across an artist, Veronika Richterova, who uses recycled plastic bottles to create installations and sculptures about sea-life and underwater environments. From Richtervoa’s work I was able to see how something so useful to humans, yet harmful to coral plants can be used to create something so beautiful and wanted to take this characteristic and show it within my own work. Not wanting to focus my work on a literal representation of my research, I decided to focus on the element of beauty connecting the water and plastics and experimented with freezing, producing a range of ice models with plastic frozen in clear and ink-infused ice, thus giving me the name for this piece as ‘Infused beauty’.