Plasticity

YES, EVEN PLASTICS CAN BE
ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Is it Plastic or Ceramic?
Treasured Vessels by Jami Porter Lara
(American artist, b. 1969 in Spokane, Washington;
currently lives in New Mexico)
I learned about the work of Jami Porter Lara when I saw her 2017 solo exhibition -- Border Crossing -- at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her video presentation includes the following hopeful advice:

leave no trace

do no harm

or go one better

why write ourselves out of the story?

why keep telling ourselves only a narrative of apocalypse?

that makes me bristle as an artist

I want to create something that the earth needs

the things that we make
can / will remake us as a species

there is no line between what is
human nature and what is technological

those lines that we believe divide us
from nature or technology don't exist

Re-conceptualized two-liter plastic bottles

***********************

Coincidentally, reclaimed plastics artist Aurora Robson says that her artwork is all about "intercepting the plastic stream . . . and devolop[ing] more connections around the idea of plastic. pollution being reduced. She makes artwork out of plastic waste, turning "plastic pollution into fantastical dreamscapes."

The Great Indoors:
"a landscape based loosely on
microscopic imagery of the human body"
by Aurora Robson
(Canadian - American artist, b. 1972 in Toronto;
grew up in Hawaii, currently lives in New York)

Speaking of one - use plastics, she says:

"It's nice to give them a second life. . . . I'm trying to subjugate the negative qualities of this global nightmare of plastic pollution. Garbage is inherently chaotic. I try to give it all the opposite qualities . . . groth . . . formal and structual qualities . . . so that hopefully if I do a good enough job, it'll never find its way back into the waste stream. We have this fake sense of hierarchy that we've applied to matter. We say this piece of plastic has not value next to this piece of bronze."

Junk Mail Collage

Additional Plastic Connections

1. Philadelphia Multimedia Artist
Amy Orr
reinventing discarded plastics
like this beach house shower
covered with credit card shingles


2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Defined esemplastic as
"the unifying – power of the imagination"

"Like that great Spirit, who with plastic sweep
Mov'd on the darkness of the formless Deep!"

lines 13–14
from the poem To Bowles [written 1794, 1796]
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)


3. Plastic Shoes by Rothy's

4. Plastic bags are not all bad!
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, June 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com