07/19/2022
“How Long Is Forever?”
Upcycled and mixed media wall hanging.
“Alice: How long is forever?
White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.”
― Lewis Carroll
While creating this piece, my original intent was to simply upcycle a bunch of plastic lids which had accumulated in my studio. A few years ago, our disposal service set rules that they would not recycle plastic bottles that still had their lids attached. I couldn’t bear to throw the lids away, knowing that plastic doesn’t really disintegrate… and of course thinking to myself “I could make something with these, someday”. When it breaks down, plastic doesn’t get absorbed into the earth like organic waste does, instead it turns into microplastics (smaller and smaller bits of plastic) which have been found in our water, the food chain, and even in the human bloodstream. We are poisoning ourselves with our waste. https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/how-do-we-know-plastic-will-take-so-long-to-decompose.html
I played around with the composition of the lids and decided that I best liked the simplicity of stacking some of them in color groupings, and scattering those groupings around the interior of a hoop. If you have worked with plastic, you know that it is a difficult material to glue, so the connections here are mostly mechanical. The outer wooden hoop was covered in rainbow ombre thread. As I added two thread covered rings to the top (forming a potential hanger option for this piece), it occurred to me that this was looking like a crazy pocket watch clock face, especially after I had counted the lid sets and realized that unintentionally there were 12 separate sets of them running around the inside of the circle. That led my thoughts to the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, and the quote from Alice, “How long is Forever?”, which I think perfectly fits the narrative of my intent, awareness that plastic waste lasts “forever”.
This piece is the second in my latest series, exploring ways to upcycle plastic waste. To see my first piece, Creative Journeys, click here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CeCGhQcu8ZX/?igshid=NDBlY2NjN2I=
