Sustainability Piece

From the beginning of this assignment, I was curious about the effects of plastic and how plastic continuously harms our ocean, but I wanted to find a new and unique way to represent this idea. I remembered hearing Professor Mongiovi discussing and showing our class a traditional net she had created for one of her shows and I was intrigued by this idea. I wanted to find a way to blend these two ideas into a unique and thought-provoking piece. I finally decided that the best way to combine the two ideas would be to collect trash from the beach, clean it, and turn it into strips of weave able material. Once I had collected enough trash, cleaned it, and turned it into strips, I had to figure out how to connect it all and make the trash tie together. It was during this process that I had to change my direction slightly. The trash i had found and was attempting to use would not come together in a neat and clean manner which left the piece looking messy. I reevaluated and realized I personally had several plastic bags and found many plastic grocery bags on the beach. With this, I decided to not use the other trash and focus on using the plastic bags as my yarn-like material to create the net. I enjoyed the rhythmic process of creating this net and ended up making two and tying them together to add more width to the piece. I believe if I were to recreate this piece id like to add a third or fourth net to it to give it even more width and make it even more net-like.