Kimberly Brooks on John Dahlsen a – Huffington Post
In the wake of Earth Day, green-bordered magazines and quivering news reports of Global Warming, it could be easy to dismiss the occasion as an over commercialisation on par with Christmas.
But one only need to discover the plastic mass twice the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, for example, or to learn there are 43,000 pieces of plastic per square mile of ocean to send chills down the spine of even, perhaps, Rush Limbaugh, to know that ’tis not at all overdone. If anything it should be Earth Month, no Earth Year – and every year at that.
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Hence continue to I celebrate artists who keep our havoc in plain sight by making tangible visuals from the non-biodegradable trash we heap onto our oceans and on our planet.
Australian artist John Dahlsen is one such artist who has taken it upon himself to use items discarded on beaches to create art.
Dahlsen scours Australian beaches for found materials to recycle and transform into environmental art. Below behold “totems” of flip-flops conveniently organized by warm and cool colours for our instant viewing horror/pleasure.
Besides the thongs, Dahlsen has made a series of totems out of plastic soda bottles, buoys, foam, and driftwood.
In another series, Dahlsen uses found plastic bags (now banned in certain cities such as San Francisco), and layers them to create seascapes that resemble sand-sculptures.
Kimberly Brooks: Was there a defining moment that pointed you towards your work?
John Dahlsen: I was collecting driftwood, on a remote Victorian Coastline, with the intention of making furniture and stumbled upon vast amounts of plastic ocean debris. This whole new palette of colour and shape revealing itself to me immediately affected me; I had never seen such hues and forms before which enabled me to make new environmental art.
Since then – for approximately 10 years, I scoured Australian beaches for found objects, much of which I found as washed up ‘ocean litter’. I have since discovered this is a worldwide phenomenon, affecting beaches on a global level.
