Ellie Edwards

I interpreted the plastics project as a chance to create something which reflects and sheds light upon the plastic pandemic the world is currently facing. I focused primarily on nature and how it is impacted by the production and consumption of plastics. My secondary research into plastic pollution helped tunnel my initial ideas into the environmental issues and the harmful impacts caused by plastics in our seas and on our land. The contrast between the natural world and the artificiality of plastic interested me from the beginning. An article from the National Geographic heavily informed my work; I read that on “an uninhabited island… between Chile and New Zealand, scientists found plastic items from Russia, the US, Europe, South America, Japan and China” (Parker, L, 2019). This fact alone I felt perfectly summed up the extent of the destruction and brutality of plastics and I wanted to encapsulate the same feeling in my work.

As a starting point, I allowed the weather to change and manipulate a painting on a plastic surface, showing how plastics have contributed to climate change. This process was not entirely successful, but it did contribute to the development of my ideas and led me onto crafting a more successful miniature sculpture. The artist Mariele Neudecker was a great inspiration for my final outcome. In her “tank works” series (2002) she depicted small scale replicas of natural landscapes trapped within cube sculptures. I found the realism of her work mesmerising, and I realised that an efficient way to make the audience truly understand the scale of the destruction created by plastics was to simply recreate it. Therefore, I created three different tiny ecosystems in a single plastic cuboid shaped tube: A rainforest, a savanna and the artic. The scale of the ecosystems inside the tube reflect the delicacy of natural landscapes and ecosystems despite how physically large they are and how plastics are easily destroying our natural world. The plastic tube is larger than the ecosystems; the landscapes are in fact trapped within the plastic, emphasising how plastic pollution is suffocating our natural landscapes. I think my final outcome has communicated my ideas and intentions very effectively, the audience has to look through the translucent plastic to uncover the beauty of nature.