Scarlett Orchard

This project covers the relationship I feel between individuals and their choices and their physical, cultural, and environmental influences. I have looked at pollution, materials properties, and our consumptions within my pieces.I am fascinated by our way of life in that we praise and demonise the effects of plastics almost in the same breath.  We celebrate the good within plastics for the saving of lives via human medicine.  In the lifesaving tubes that help us breath on the operating table and during the Covid-19 pandemic with face masks and PPE.  However, our cultures way of seeing all these ‘generally one of used disposable plastics’ as someone else’s problem and we breathe up to 7,000 microplastic particles every day from clothes, toys, and furnishings.  Therefore, I thought this fitting to create ‘lungs’ made of a plastic bag.

Experimenting, I was able to become more interested within the idea of the human body from the plastics drowning in plastics documentary of the sea birds and their stomachs to the severity of the plastics they consume. I quickly drew inspiration from the use of a basic everyday object taken for granted, ‘The Plastic Bag’ and this would bring suffering upon sea animals such as turtles, through this consumption, from local birds to animals hundreds of thousands of miles away.

I recalled an exhibition I attended a few years ago in London with my family, ‘Body Worlds’ this interactive exhibition showcased the pioneering work of Dr Gunther Von Hagens and Dr Angela Whalley, whose techniques preserves real bodies. This exhibition inspired me when coming to focusing on the human body/ the placements, shape, texture, and colours. My plastic bags with the ink slathered on top, I believe that this would create a real-life texture and interpretation to be shown before the printing process.

I believe the overall effectiveness and the ideas communicated in my final outcomes were visually striking.  I created initially a sticky and grotesque, and I believe life-like creation by the tinged red-orange and fleshy colours contrasting between the textural beauty of the piece.