Novel Entities

NOVEL ENTITIES

My first beach-plastic piece I did over 20 years ago on a beach in Sardinia. It was there where I realized the seriousness of the ongoing global pollution of our oceans and beaches and decided to no longer remain passive. I started with cleaning beaches from plastic debris closer to home ; the west coast of Sweden.

For me it became a way of being able to deal with the sentiment of grieve because of this global problem and turn this into something more manageable. Unable to solve the problem, at least being part of a solution. Cleaning beaches has given me an extra goal on my excursions, a good thing to combine with experiencing nature and discovering new places. It is sometimes hard work and time consuming, but enormously satisfying.

A part of the plastic debris I find ends up in my studio. My main attention goes to ropes, cords and fishing nets . Rope is an interesting artist's material and comes in all possible dimensions, lengths and colors, although mostly in green and orange. Sometimes old, faded and worn, sometimes new and fresh.

After sorting and cleaning (including 60°C machine wash) a process of transformation starts in the studio, from the dirtiest trash into something worth keeping.

My rope works point out the problems of plastic pollution and environmental destruction by it’s material. But they also tell something else. Something about displacement and travelling, about longing away. About time and chance. I see the connection to some ethnographic works, like abstract handicraft from the Amazon or the Congo, something you might find in an ethnographic museum, soft and tactile like a textile.

I also think about what future societies would produce after a possible civilizational collapse. We know how long plastic can survive before it falls apart, so it will be there even long after we stopped producing new. Will low tech societies in the future use our plastic garbage for making body dekoration or masks?