Work for me as an environmental artist began accidentally.
In the middle of the 1990’s I was collecting driftwood in Victoria on the southern Australian coastline. I had intended to make furniture out of my finds, as I had done as a student at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne in the late ‘70s and throughout the subsequent years.
During these trips to remote beaches, I stumbled across vast amounts of plastic debris that were washing up on the shoreline, and I felt compelled to collect it. With my initial collection I had amassed the bags full of found plastics, all of which I had intended to take to the recycling section of the local tip.
The more items I collected however, the more intrigued I grew about their form, their color and I began to absorb the degree to which these plastics had become a scourge to our environment. The objects I collected were of many different varieties. Some were ropes and string, very colorful and obviously from boats or ships; some were Styrofoam rounded off by the rocks or by being swept along by the ocean and bleached by the sun; some were plastic drinking bottles.
There were of course, myriad plastics that were chipped and broken. Sometimes these found objects were unrecognizable as the consumer items they once were. There were also buoys and thongs (flip-flops) in dozens of colors.
The objects cast from the sea and deposited to the shore were endless in amount, shape, color and content. This medium, it occurred to me, could supply an endless array of possibilities. After shipping all the materials back to my studio, I slowly spread the items along the floor, where a giant painter’s palette began to assemble.
I began to make art out of the gathered plastics after I had finished making the complete household of driftwood furniture. It was during the construction of the furniture that I had time to dwell on the possibilities of working also with plastic rubbish. In an uncanny way these plastics, as they were sorted and arranged in my studio, took on an unspeakable, indefinable and quite magical beauty. Exposed on the floor, they continued to fascinate me.
