Artist Statement: Viral Plastic

Title: Viral Plastic

Presentation

Artist Summary

Questioning the Unseen

 

This sculpture aims to speak to the power of microbes and of the unseen, and illustrate the permanent damage we inflict in response in the form of single-use plastic. By coopting plastic as a material to construct a natural entity –a virus– viewers are challenged to question where future pandemics will come from: especially as climate change accelerates, loss of habitat spreads, and vector-borne diseases amplify.

This tiny pathogen thoroughly disrupted and destroyed human lives– but long after viral threat is resolved, the damage of the abundant plastic waste we’ve created will persist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contrast in scale

I wanted to illustrate the difference in scale of the challenges of our temporary daily existence in comparison to the centuries-long impacts of plastic accumulation. I created a model of SARS-CoV-2 from the plastic waste I’ve accumulated over less than one week in quarantine. When there is a risk of contamination, almost everything shifts to single-use disposable plastic and will be considered biohazardous, then incinerated.

Viruses are so small that they can’t even be seen under a normal microscope. Yet the entire world has been thrown into disarray, lives have been dramatically altered, and systems have been restructured that we thought were impenetrable. On the productive side,  standardized testing was paused, practices like paid sick leave became more widespread, and awareness grew about mental health and global health inequality. The amount of plastic waste from personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks, gloves, face shields, and gowns has amplified far beyond normal levels, with 129 billion masks used already in just one year (“Face Masks and the Environment…”). Beyond this, we’ve wasted immeasurable single use plastic we use, so I didn’t include any PPE in sculpture but used all this other waste deemed biohazardous. Biohazardous waste requires substantially more energy and money to process and incinerate compared with general waste or recycling, and creating this sculpture out of otherwise “harmless” materials — plastic water bottles, soup cartons, plastic packaging– illustrates how the fear of contagion skews our perceptions of danger. Thinking of this plastic as an infectious agent helps illustrate the dangers of global plastic accumulation.

 

Difficulties in project realization

It was difficult to find inspiration for what to create, partially because I had no glue or tools to make a more complicated structure, but also because it was hard to imagine something adequate to represent the gravity and destruction of both this experience and the experiences of people around the world. While much of the world now has shifted to joking about covid as it feels less immediate and threatening, it remains deeply catastrophic to billions of people around the world. I was afraid that making a model of the virus would seem like an ironic joke, but hope that it creates a sense of scale.

It didn’t work as well as I hoped, as the shape isn’t exactly spherical so it is less recognizable as a coronavirus.

 

Lessons learned

I learned that I can be quite resourceful, as I tore a plastic label into a long thin ribbon to have a way to tie things together, and I used a cardboard box to make a “window seat” chair on top of some shelves to be able to sit near the window. I also learned that the hardest part for me is coming up with one idea to go with, but this is easier when there are many sources of inspiration (which I had lost by the 6th day of being in this room).

I was surprised by how the volume of this plastic waste became much smaller than I expected. I cut up the plastic bottles into smaller square pieces, which made the structure more compressible and the higher density made it look much smaller. Still, this is substantially more plastic waste than I would usually create in a few days, and imagining it being incinerated soon is quite sad since doing so releases toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases. I am glad that this isn’t as much plastic as I expected, but the sculpture doesn’t look as impressive as a structure; it kind of just looks like a full, small trash bag with some utensils stabbed into it, even though it took a lot more effort than that. If I accumulated a larger quantity of waste to make this a human-sized sculpture, it could be a lot more powerful by illustrating how much waste will be around for 400+ years, long after the one human life who created it. It would be powerful to make a huge version and display in a prominent place, but I definitely can’t do that with this waste I have to put in a bin for biohazardous waste.

 

References

Lindwall, Courtney. “Single-Use Plastics 101.” NRDC. Accessed June 2, 2021. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/single-use-plastics-101.

Genevieve Silva, Pallavi Sreedhar, Hannah Greene.  “Op-Ed: Is Medical Waste … Racist? | MedPage Today.” Accessed May 30, 2021. https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/ethics/87415?trw=no.

Google Docs. “Resources: Healthcare Waste & Environmental Justice.” Accessed June 2, 2021. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HRFHURa9GsAdx-t5_yC_5WB-MDrx6kO0G06F4089pXM/edit?usp=embed_facebook.

MedPro Disposal. “These Diseases Can Be Caused by Improperly Disposed of Medical Waste,” September 11, 2017. https://www.medprodisposal.com/medical-waste-disposal/improperly-disposed-of-medical-waste/.

Minoglou, Minas, Spyridoula Gerassimidou, and Dimitrios Komilis. “Healthcare Waste Generation Worldwide and Its Dependence on Socio-Economic and Environmental Factors.” Sustainability 9, no. 2 (2017): 220.

Shah, Syed Ahmad Amin. “Types of Hospital Waste | Risk Waste, Non-Risk Waste.” Accessed June 2, 2021. https://www.aboutcivil.org/hospital-waste-types.html.

University of Southern Denmark. “Face masks and the environment: Preventing the next plastic problem.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 10 March 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210310122431.htm>.