Word vomit about ocean plastic (15 min)
Checked out & watched 2 documentaries: Manufactured Landscapes & Rivers and Tides (3 hrs)
Searched www.greenmuseum.org, good resource :) (1/2 hr)
Worked on plastic quilt (4 hrs)
Discovered/Accomplished: Watching the documentaries this weekend was really beneficial for me. I love watching Andy Goldsworthy's process and it made me think a lot about how time is incorporated in his work. I thought Manufactured Landscapes was absolutely incredible. Ed Burtynsky photographs landscapes that have been transformed by man in some way and the documentary has a particular focus on China's industrialization. I love the eerie or surreal feeling I get from the still images and the video footage in the documentary. It is hard for me to believe that industrial processes exist in such a huge way, but they can because the world is so huge... now with globalization we don't actually have to look at where we are getting all of our resources because they are shipped in from somewhere else. In turn our garbage is taken away too... out of sight out of mind?
A few of Ed Burtynsky's photos:
We take resources from the earth:
We build things with these resources/we build ships which transport other products:
Once our products have served their purpose we dispose of them and they return to earth, but in an altered form. We may "scrap" our used products to reuse or recycle:
But ultimately we are a part of an incredibly complex cycle of gathering, producing, using, destroying, re-gathering:
Our end products become recycled and incorporated into our new environment. We produce plastic bags from petroleum products gleaned from the earth, we use these bags, we dispose of them in some way, they find their way to garbage dumps or recycling centers, or they end up in our water. They make their way to the ocean where they circle in gyres to form enormous dumping grounds of our waste. Slowly (it takes a plastic bag 1,000 years to biodegrade) they leach into the water supply and bioaccumulate up the food chain. They make their way into the foods we eat. So it seems that not only do we bring our groceries home in plastic bags, but we will eventually be consuming the chemicals of that plastic at some point. The cycles are just crazy and keep running circles in my brain.
I have also been doing a lot of thinking about how I would like my work to be perceived by my audience/what do I want my work to do? I am a little worried about becoming too activist minded because I am worried that my pieces will become a little too preachy. I don't want the end result of my project to be a message like: don't use plastic bags, use canvas instead. I think that is a little bit too simple and the environmental issues we are dealing with are much more complex than that. I took this quote from the Manufactured Landscapes documentary because I felt that it really spoke to a lot of the problems I have been thinking about.
Ed Burtynsky:
"We are changing the nature of this planet. We are changing the air, we are changing the water, we are changing the land. That's not just China, that's the world at large. There are times where I have thought about my work and putting it into a more politicized environment. If I said, 'this is a terrible thing that we are doing to the planet' then people will either agree or disagree. By not saying what you should see, that may allow them to look at something that they have never looked at and to see their world a little differently. I think many people today sit in that uncomfortable spot where we don't necessarily want to give up what we have, but we realize that what we are doing is creating problems that run deep. It's not a simple right or wrong. It needs a whole new way of thinking."
On a separate note, I have continued to work on my plastic quilt. It is continuing to grow in size and I think it has a lot of potential. For whatever reason I want to make it really large. I just think that it's movement gets more interesting as it grows.
Do: 1. Word mapping about cycles. What specific issues am I really interested in and how are they related?
2. Continue to work on the plastic quilt & photograph it in water. This weekend I probably won't be able to photograph it underwater, but I would like to put it in water (maybe the river?) so that I can observe it in a different way. I also want to make some images. I think the process will be beneficial for me, and I will be able to see what I might need to do in order to get a better aesthetic effect from the piece.
3. Contact pool people again. I haven't heard back from the contact I emailed, so I have a few other people in mind who may be able to help me get access.
