In This Exhibition
Past Works
I work to reimagine life cycles of common discarded goods in the United States. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 12.2% of household-to-landfill waste is plastic, while textiles, including synthetics like polyester, comprise 5.8%. Plastic material, while durable and necessary for certain products, is overused by manufacturers. Thereby consumers over-discard plastic which pollutes landscapes, whether as landfills, litter, or microplastic when plastic fabric and packaging is abraded and spread into all ecosystems.
While the onus is often placed on consumers not to pollute, this raises the question: why manufacture from plastic in the first place? Given the longevity of plastics, the decision by producers to make single-use packaging or low-quality garments out of synthetic polyester fabric should never have been an option for the safety of man-made or natural ecosystems. Thus, I work toward a future where my work becomes obsolete—a future where the responsibility of packaging returns to manufacturers.
Unlike mass production’s exploitative labor, I take as long as I need to complete a piece: I hand-rip existing seams, hand-wash food residue from plastic packaging, and salvage plastic waste from roadside litter. In doing so, I embody ethical labor. I hope not to imbue more energy wasted on these disposed materials with electric-powered machine, but instead invest craftsmanship into making the most out of the indefinite lifespan of these materials. By creating items such as patchwork jeans, plastic food packaging tote bags, and reworked dress shirts to blouses, my work demonstrates some of many possible futures for the halting and re-cycling of presently wasted resources, beginning with land fill. By including metrics such as time taken to refit garments and craft tote bags, as well as framing cost to purchase in terms of this time, I hope to reconcile the relationship I and viewers have with invaluable and undisposable materials, and the prices we expect to pay for them.