Art

Plastics are polymers with names that sound like tongue-twisters (Polyethylene terephthalate anyone?) Despite their weird names, they are everywhere: in almost every object we touch. Furthered by mass production and culture over the last fifty years, plastic is practical and cheap.

Yet plastics hide deeper, darker meanings behind their shiny flexible surfaces. Plastics have become especially synonymous with a growing concern for our consumerist habits, as plastic bags and bottles clog our oceans and our forests.

In art, plastic has recently inspired a lot of cool installation pieces, being such a malleable, as well as meaningful, material. Plastic art can comment on our fragile ecosystem, and be fun and tactile.  Whether it’s salvaged plastic, or just the flexibility of the material itself: plastic in art is here to stay.

Uncanny Plastics- Human Faces in Plastic

Image credit: Playingwithbrushes

The decaying plastic of these broken dolls is creepy and shows how quickly plastic products become obsolete. Like the peeling away of a façade, plastic decay is uncomfortable to watch. Unsettling, it makes us realise how transient a material plastic is. We are used to seeing it in its most pristine condition only. Decaying, broken plastic- is there anything sadder in the world? It’s like the falling away of some optimist dream…

Image credit: Mary Ellen Croteau

An eye made entirely out of plastic transgresses an uncomfortable boundary between human and plastic. This beautiful eye made by Mary Ellen Croteau is part of her longstanding environmental art project: reusing unrecycled plastics to tell stories about people. Croteau’s work highlights the extent to which non-recycled plastic is clogging up our environment, but by putting plastics into a human message she does this in an aesthetic way.

Plastic Rainbow- The Plastic Colour Palette

Image credit: SimplyPlastics.Com

After research into coloured plastics and plastic technology on SimplyPlastics.Com, it became clear how important the plastic colour palette has become to art. In fact, some art forms like street and Pop art have been exclusively influenced by fluorescent plastic colours, and would have not developed without them.

Image credit: Plastic Forever

Since 1999 Richard and Judith Lang have been creating these vibrant and touching pieces of plastic art; all plastic they used is salvaged from US beaches. Despite the vibrancy, all the plastic is completely untreated (only cleaned) and for the artists it is the material’s “unlimited hues” that make it a “great palette of plastic”.  Their work proves that staunchly environmental art can also be fun and contemporary (and colourful!). Check out some their latest inspirational work here.

Our Oceans & Plastic

Image credit: Amanda

We all know that discarded plastic is a huge environmental issue, affecting our oceans and its fragile ecosystem. Environmental art pieces like this made out of plastic are so important because they remind us about the consequences of our simple daily actions. Moving away from drinking from disposable plastic (water) bottles has been the focus of many environmentalist and recycling campaigns of recent years. These huge bottles made out of hundreds of smaller ones, highlight the expediency of the issue, as well as being fun and tactile.

Image credit: http://www.sustainablecherryhill.org/plastic-ocean-project-art-exhibit-and-lecture/

This majestic environmental piece is a parody of the famous Japanese Wave print by Hokusai. Here the traditionally pristine ocean is replaced by a murky and dense mess of rubbish. Recycling a classic work of art like this is ingenious, and has elements of the fun irony of 50s Pop art.

Breathing Plastic- Interactive Material

Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/art_inthecity/

There’s something sinister about the plastic tentacles in this installation, rustling above you in an eerie blue glow. Here, plastic was the basis of an exploration of the human ecosystem. This interactive art installation from Montréal’s Art Souterrain in 2014, mimicked the rhythm of breath as you walked through it.

Though there is something slightly unnerving about it, this installation reminds us of how plastics are often used in medicine to simulate human bodily functions. Plastics are integral to modern medicine and have changed many people’s lives in the form of prosthetics.

So despite the obvious concerns surrounding plastics, their vibrant colour palette and widespread benevolent usage in medicine are inspiring. Have you got any quirky plastic-inspired art you’d like to share?

*this post was in collaboration with Simply Plastics.

Instead of going up the pub or binge watching stuff on Netflix I decided to do something completely different last weekend; I went glassblowing.

I was lucky enough to be invited along to  Creative Vibe Studio, tucked away in Ampthill and taught a new skill by artist and glassblowing master Ricky Keech.

Me and a few friends headed over on a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon to learn his trade.

I’ll start off by saying I was not a natural.  I was scared of the crucible (aka a pit of burning fire and molten glass) as well as being terrified of tripping over something and burning someone else or myself! But Ricky is very safety conscious and ensured we were wearing all of the correct safety gear and went through health and safety practice before we even touched any of the equipment. This put my mind at ease and I quickly let go of my fears.

Ricky regularly runs glassblowing courses for no more than two people so that you can develop your skills at your own pace with Ricky’s full supervision. This is how my day went.

A beginner’s experience of glassblowing 101

Before we made anything that we could keep, Ricky wanted us to get to grips with picking up liquid glass using the rod, cooling it and then finally releasing it from the rod. So, to begin, you need to hold the glass blowing rod at an angle and carefully place it into the crucible.

You must be turning your stick slowly at all times to keep the glass from dripping and going out of shape. Once you pick up a blob of glass, you then take it through to a steal surface and gently roll it along the top to cool it down.

Once there is enough glass on the end, we then had to sit on the bench, roll the rod back and forth whilst using pinchers to make a circular line around the glass to help to ease it off the end of the rod.

At this point, we hadn’t actually used any puff. This came next. Along with adding colour. It had already been a complex process but I’d managed to master picking up and shaping molten glass in less than an hour so you could too!

Adding colour to blown glass

Just as we collected glass from the crucible, we gathered a blob of glass; turning and rolling as we sat on the bench. But this time we blew down the rod. Quickly and sharp. This caused a bubble of air to be trapped in the glass and expand the molten.

You need to keep collecting more liquid glass as you continue to blow down the rod and expand the glass. As the glass grows you can then begin to add colour in the form of powered material – I think it was powdered glass!

Here’s what the glass looks like with colour whilst it’s cooling:

I can’t believe we managed to  get to this stage in under two hours but we did it!

And we even managed to make these paperweights by following the same process

Image courtesy my mate Gina Hutchings

In less than three hours we had managed to make something useful and attractive. And that credits Ricky’s skill as a tutor. I definitely impressed myself that day and really enjoyed being back in the workshop – it felt like I was back at art school.

If you would rather do something different with your weekend and pick up a new skill, I highly recommend glassblowing. Ricky’s glassblowing classes comprise beginner level, paperweight making classes and full day glassblowing experiences – all of which are affordable for either a present or as a treat to yourself.

A couple of weekends back I made it down to Art15 at The Olympia in London.

We made early doors and benefited from a reasonably empty exhibition space, allowing us to get up close to individual works. That’s my pro tip for major art fairs; get down there as early as possible if you actually want to get to see everything at your own pace.

The global art fair’s has a  commitment to showcasing emerging talent and new galleries alongside some more established artists from  around the world. And I have to say, I was overwhelmed with the amount of new talent being represented.

Some have remarked that the fair is “just not high-end enough, fashionable enough, or commercial enough in terms of sales”, and is yet to find it’s identity. I think this is a positive. It means that the fair isn’t being driven by commercial gains, rather, it is providing a platform for more conceptual and controversial artists across the globe to reach international audiences.

I’ve put together some pf the best bits from my visit and tried to include artist details where possible. Where I’ve missed out any names or origin, please feel free to let me know in the comments.

Overall my favourite works were a couple of photo-etchings in black ink on ivory paper by Nathalie Mba-Bikoro , which unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of on the day. You can take a look at some of his pieces here on his online portfolio. 

Did you visit Art15? What did you think? Do you think it fairly represented emerging artists.

Landscaping

I used to holiday annually with my parents on the Ilse of Wight. We’d sit down to dinner, as a family, around 7pm most nights and watch the waves crash against possibly one of Britain’s most beautiful beaches; the golden sands of Sandown.

As dusk began to settle, and the lights of the pleasure pier sparkled incandescently, a faithful group of metal detectors descended upon the beach.

I used to be quite offended by their presence. Especially when I’d see them pick up a wristwatch, spare change or goodness knows what else. I’d work myself up more so as I began to put a story behind their treasures. What if the man who lost that watch had conscientiously scrimped and saved for months to buy it. What if that meager spare change that twilight beach comber eagerly pocketed had actually been budgeted to pay for a family meal. I guess someone would be going hungry tonight. Or possibly without a 99 flake tomorrow.

Despite my internal condemnation of their hobby, each night they returned after  the last of the families and holidaymakers begrudgingly left the beach.

Then, years later, I met Ian.

Ian also enjoys the odd spot of metal detecting. I remember when he told me he had two metal detectors; my heart sank as I remembered the anger I felt towards those brazen beach combers. But Ian isn’t the type that lays in wait for families to unknowingly leave stuff behind on the beach. No. Ian prefers to scour recently disturbed patches of land. The type that are about to be ravaged by progress, cheap housing and more roads.

He jokingly calls himself a treasure hunter. He’s found old Roman coins in the past. As someone who loves ancient history, I couldn’t help but get excited at the prospect of what he might find on his next treasure hunt, so I decided to accompany him to Stewartby, along with my new telephoto lens.

Unfortunately, Ian didn’t manage to find anything. But I got some great shots. I think they capture the anticipation and the far reaching possibilities that the land could give up.

Let me know what you think