Title: Responsible Leisure
Link: Sculpture Presentation and Gallery
Artist Summary
The aim of our sculpture is to communicate to leisure seekers that they must be environmentally responsible even in relaxed settings. The beach is rightly viewed as a place where people can relax and alleviate themselves of life’s stressors, however this lax environment can also lead beach goers to disregard their litter. A lot of this waste is plastic water bottles, and we chose to use these bottles as the main medium of communication. We made a two-piece structure for our sculpture: the first one deconstructs the plastic bottle and turns ALL of its pieces into a relatable sea creature (jellyfish) that viewers can empathise with. In contrast second one (sunchair) uses the entirety of the plastic bottle to build a larger structure that explicitly reminds the viewer about the specific location (e.g., under the beach chairs) where they tend to forget their beach waste. Ultimately, the combination of the lovable mascot and the stark beach chair provide a blunt reminder of the reality plastic waste, but also foster an emotional connection to this issue of plastic waste through a cute sea creature – that (hopefully) endears people to act more responsibly.
This portrait of our mascot sunbathing imitates human activity in a way that makes it a rude reminder of the nuisance that humans can be to the ecosystem because of their beach pollution.
We also found a large rope washed up on the beach and here we use it together with the mascot as a stark reminder of the impact of any kind of human waste.
Challenges, Lessons and Improvements
Some of the challenges faced in building this sculpture included the design of the beach chair. In order to create a long segment of beach chair we realised that using a mix of bottles would not be the most stable and aesthetic choice. Here, we took advantage of smooth shaped and sturdier orange juice bottles available on campus to address this challenge. Addressing this challenge allowed us to understand the value in sorting our plastic bottles by size, strength and type (e.g. PET/HDPE) in order to take advantage of the properties of each type of plastic in our sculpting.
One failure was perhaps with the recognisability of the beach chair. The fact that we had to add a small beach towel and seashells around the sunchair suggests that it may not be very obvious that it is a beach chair. Consequently, one thing that we would change about our final result is perhaps the length and size of the chair so that it immediately and clearly strikes the viewer that they are looking at a beach chair made of their own plastic waste.
The final put-together piece. I have edited out the background to make the picture elements clearer (full picture avaiable in the linked slideshow).
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