Did you set out to make environmental art or art that would have a political message?
No I never did. When I moved into this new home and decided to make driftwood furniture, the sole intention was just to make something beautiful for the home I’d just moved into. I went to remote places along the Victorian coast where it was just four-wheel driving and venturing out to islands on boats, where huge logs of driftwood were being washed ashore and parched by the sun and the salt and knocked about on the rocks.
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They were just beautiful objects. This harked back to the days when I used to make driftwood furniture. I noticed though, that there were plastics washing up on the beach at the same time.
When I used to do this back while I was at the Victorian College of the Arts, I didn’t notice this ocean litter, because I just don’t think there were that many plastics washing up at that time, at least not the plastics that last for up to three or four hundred years, as many of these more recent plastic items do. I was coming across literally tons of this stuff. You wouldn’t see it all dumped in one place of course. But as I walked along collecting bits of driftwood, I just started pulling out one plastic bag after another and began filling them with ropes, Styrofoam, plastic bottles, buoys, thongs and plastic bits and pieces.
Before I knew it I ended up with approximately 60 jumbo garbage bags over about a three-week period. I had it all sent back to the studio in Byron Bay and I made all the driftwood furniture.
At that point I was also right in the midst of a set of paintings. Those works came to a conclusion and basically I just tipped all the stuff out onto the studio floor and found myself totally intrigued by these new shapes and particularly the new colours. I saw that I had a potential palette there.
Side by side with this, I found that there were strong environmental messages naturally being made as a result of it. But it certainly wasn’t my intention. Somewhere I think my care for the planet is just inherent, in the fact that I wanted to pick these things up in the first place and get them off the beach. I could have easily just gone there and picked up all the driftwood and left that plastic stuff there, but every part of my being wouldn’t have felt comfortable with that.
There is a side of me that just is naturally caring for the environment and I think that around that time in Australia, we were also getting a lot of publicity from people like Ian Kiernan AO, (Co-founder of Clean up Australia/Clean up the World with Kim Mackay AO), and people like them who started this whole environmental push.
So partially as a result of that information coming my way, but also naturally having that as part of my personality, explained for me my instincts in collecting this plastic debris of the beaches.
I didn’t intentionally start making political art or aim to explore environmental issues in my art. It just happened. But the longer I’ve been doing it, the more alert I’ve found myself to some of the issues you can bring up by the use of certain materials, including the whole plastic bag series that I’ve done and that I continue to promote for large, public art projects.
