Ted Wybourn

I was shocked when I was watching the ‘Drowning in Plastics’ documentary. Mainly due to the huge effects that plastics is having on marine life and what the animals are having to go through for example the sea birds having plastic in their stomach and the whales being caught in the lobster cables. I then undertook further research and was particularly interested in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The garbage patch is formed by 4 currents rotating clockwise around an area of 20 million square kilometres. It surprised me that no one knows how much debris makes up the garbage patch. This inspired me to then do more research and to investigate artists that produced work in a similar way to what the garbage patch looked like, i.e., plastic floating in the water. The artist that really grabbed my attention and that I was most inspired by was Anne Percoco with Indra’s Cloud. Indra’s Cloud is a raft constructed from used plastic bottles which is bound together with recycled labels which were used for rope. The bottles were flipped upside down then tied together round the caps and bottle neck. My final piece was based of this idea. I collected multiple bottles and joined them together using the plastic wrappers that were around the bottles, I also interconnected them by the way I put the bottle lids together. The bottles were filled with water and put in a clear bowl of water so that they would float and because they have water in them the bottles would be half in and half out the water with the intention of them not completely floating. Then I added colour to the water in the bottles to resemble the sea water and ocean that the bottles would have been floating in. I wanted to convey how easy it was to be able to collect plastic and the problems caused by the plastics floating in the ocean and how it can severely affect the marine life and create great areas of floating plastic just like the great pacific garbage patch.