old and new avenues
It started with plants and plastic
I have this thing about the enormous amount of plastic produced daily around the world. Here in South Africa it piles up on the side of highways, clogs our waterways and generally swamps our natural environments.
10 years ago I created a body of work that looked at similarities between invasive plant species in the Western Cape and the invasiveness of plastic pollution.
I am still addressing this ecological boiling pot and it’s even worse 10 yrs on. Below is the next chapter ….
Paintings that lead to sculptures
enter Artificial Intelligence
Creating images using AI programmes across the internet is a new avenue that I can use to explore hybridising plastic and indigenous South African plants. It gives this body of work new scope and I have started with “still life paintings’ born out of AI. From these paintings this busy artist mom is building sculptures out of waste plastic that I have collected for over a year. That’s a lot of milk bottles.
These wonderfully strange new hybrid life forms are taking shape.
#plasticorganic is back in business and I am hoping to showcase this ecological nightmare in a new way in order to help draw attention to it.
That's not all
I started thinking about how, even with our efforts to preserve nature, we still have the potential to destroy it.
A keepsake of the present, without the rose-tinted denial, perhaps?
I’ve always liked snow globes. How about a snow globe as a snapshot of this time in which we currently live? These consumer products are sold at tourist venues to promote our beautiful natural environments. But they are made of materials that harm nature.
So here it is. South African fynbos has a ‘parasite’, the wind-scattered plastic litter that settles, sits and waits. Toxicity leaches over time. What will the future of the floral kingdom look like after us?
