Recycled materials for me, have been a great source of inspiration. I keep seeing various possibilities as to how I can use recycled materials in my artworks all the time. It never ceases to amaze me how many ways that we can recycle and it’s really a great thing that recycling has become so topical nowadays.
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I remember when I first started working with the found plastics that I discovered when I was walking the beaches collecting driftwood, in order to make furniture. I guess even that fact that I wanted to use recycled driftwood to make my furniture was indicative that I had it in my blood to reuse objects. So it began for me with driftwood, well before it became fashionable to make furniture from this material.
I first had the intention of making furniture from driftwood when I was around 19 years old and was at art school, this was the end of the 70s.
My next foray into working with these materials was 15 years later. It was during this time that I discovered the plastics washing up.
Seeing these plastics washing up on our beaches was a relatively new phenomenon for me, as I hadn’t noticed plastics washing up 15 years prior when I first started working with the driftwood.
I suppose that ocean litter, in the form of plastics washing around our oceans, just became more prevalent during a 15-year period and have become even more prevalent to this day.
We all know about the “Garbage Patch”, situated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where vast amounts of plastics churn around creating toxins and danger to shipping and to sea life.
Following my working with the recycled materials in the form of plastics which I turned into predominantly wall works, sculptures, hanging installations and prints.
I then looked to other materials, which I found interesting as recycled materials to work worth.
One of the first of these materials was recycled plastic bags. I went into making more works with these materials mainly in the form of wall works, assemblages, which were fairly abstract assemblages encased in Perspex.
This was to extend at a later time into sculpture in the form of various shapes I created out of clear acrylic tubing.
I worked on a project in Jefferson City Missouri in the US, where I was artist in residence and created a series of sculptures for their sculpture walk.
It was great to take all of this to another level and gave me further ideas for how I could continue to work with recycled materials almost in an unlimited fashion.
