Neve Mills

My project began with an interest in the effects of plastic on marine life. After watching the documentary Drowning in Plastic, (Drowning in Plastic, 2018) there was one image in particular which stuck in my mind: a plastic water bottle on the ocean floor filled with a mass of coral growing out of it. I was fascinated by this juxtaposition of an organic, unique creature growing out of a uniform, ordinary plastic bottle.

I became interested in material properties, thinking about how I could respond to the words ‘suffocation’ and ‘trapped’ in the way that marine life is by plastic. I gathered bottles and began to experiment with stuffing plastics inside. I used a variety of found materials such as sweet wrappers, plastic bags, and fabrics. Some were malleable and the process of squishing them in created intricate textures within that I then began to photograph. I added liquid to some, interested in how the materials became suspended. I believe my most successful outcomes came from the inflated plastics, in how they were squashed inside the bottle, communicating the link to plastics' effect on wildlife.

Through this process I discovered the concept of bottle bricking, and how my work could be a less functional variation of it. Bottle bricking is where you stuff a plastic bottle full of plastic pieces incredibly tightly. On a smaller scale, they can be used to contain waste plastics and prevent them from deteriorating into microplastics. These ‘bricks’ can also be used as a building material, and have been used to construct houses and schools worldwide (Hopkins 2014).

As I created more bottle experiments, I discovered the piece “Cubes” by Lernert & Sander (Lernert and Sander 2015). This inspired my development as I became interested in the idea of creating multiples. The bottles took rubbish, something we are so used to seeing discarded haphazardly on the side of the road or in landfills, and categorized it, making the textures all the more visible. This is done in “Cubes”: taking the food out of its normal context and abstracting it to make the textures within the foods the focal point.

My focus on photography in the final stages of this project allowed me to experiment with lighting and scale. This further abstracted the plastics out of their recognizable context into an artistic one.