Plastic, Textile, Folded Book Botanical Sculptures Drawings
I have a great love, affinity yet grave concern for the animal kingdom, and like many people, I believe the way humans live is detrimental to the existence of flora and fauna.
My plastic/textile and book-folded floral art is a response to indicate the harm that we cause by documenting waste produced by using recycled materials to showcase the beauty of our world in botanicas.
I made a conscious lifestyle choice, that as an alternative to my plastic household waste ending up in landfills or the ocean, I would instead create artworks that pay tribute and show a sign of respect to the planet with the hope of creating much-needed awareness about the climate crisis and to showcase the many uses those plastic materials can have.
I collect and recycle plastic bottles, and cut and shape them with tools and heat methods to form mostly floral pieces, which are often hand colour. I also make fibre petals which are made of a combination of wool, cotton, acrylic and silk yarns, and threads mixed with PVA glue and pressed between boards in a book press for a week that end up resembling plastic petals.
There are usually other textile features added to the work, like centrifugal pom-poms as the core of the flowers, also using old video and audio tape like I use yarn to make the pom-poms. In addition to these materials.
Recycled, Discarded Library Books – A New Lease of Life
Another aspect of this project is to raise awareness about how much we harm animals and their natural habitats by using old books rather than them too ending up in a landfill. Many libraries, for example, throw away books that are no longer being borrowed, possibly because their subject matter has become redundant or no longer popular, or simply because the books are so damaged that they are no longer fit for purpose and too expensive to restore and because many people use technology to access information.
Technology is an intricate part of our daily lives, and our existence; it’s here to stay, but not without a cost. Using folded books in my work, I wanted to create awareness that as technology goes out of date very rapidly, old technology like mobile phones, laptops and even outmoded audio and video cassettes which are still discarded today although very obsolete, yet all still end up in the sea or landfill. My folded books aim to create a stark yet sobering reminder of this fact.