Midterm Project: “Bag Yourself” Formal Dress
By Haoquan Wang Kenneth
Artist statement
“Bag yourself” means to bag the idea of plastic into your mind and realize the plastic bags around you. I melt different kinds of plastic bags inside the dress, aiming to convey the thoughts that people know they are using plastic but they don’t realize various kinds of plastic bags such as delivery bags and bags for food, exist in all their life behaviors. The slogan on the chest “We only have one earth” is cut off from a plastic bag.
Black plastic bags are collected mainly from the fabrication lab and I ask Ayis to provide me the plastic bags which are polluted but not full when they are going to be exchanged every day. I choose the black plastic bags to be the bottom of the dress and the transparent to be the top. By using the heating iron and sewing machine, I bring my design into reality.
Background & Inspiration
We are all familiar with plastic products because we use them every day. Plastic is everywhere in our life, especially plastic bags. There are various kinds of plastic bags around us and we use massive plastic bags per day. We all know these facts and know the bad influence caused by the plastic bags but most of them only stay in the theory and pay no attention to it. I was shocked in the first class of Remade in China. We watched the documentary “Bag it” and I started to realize how plastic bags matter and how “plastic” my life really is. Because that was the first time that I began to notice that so many things around me are plastic products and our world is literally a plastic world. Before I just know that we have many plastic products in our life but not everywhere. Plastic bags for food, plastic bag for clothes, plastic bags for delivery…… I will use plastic bags for different kinds os usage but I didn’t realize it before. After that, I researched my friends and found out that they hadn’t realize it as well. Therefore, I thought that it is necessary to make the public know not only the fact that we use a huge amount of plastic bags but also the fact we are not just using simple “plastic bags” but “plastic bags for different function”. To make them aware of this issue can be a great promotion to raise the awareness of plastic life as I think.
I got the inspiration for making a dress because clothes are the first thing came to my mind when I saw the requirement of “wearable”. At first, I wanted to make pants but it was beyond my ability. So I chose to make a formal dress. After talking to professor Marcela, I got the idea that I need to make a formal dress because what I want is to make people aware of how many and what kinds of plastic bags we are using so as to encourage them to take action in their lives. For the public, they should take the plastic issue serious and it should be a formal thing. Following this thought, I came up with my project name “Bag Yourself”. I hope that everyone can “bag” the idea of plastic into their mind just like they dress themselves up formally with beautiful clothes.
Research
For the research, the first thing I did is to research on the data of plastic bags use so as to prove that we indeed use so many plastic bags, which is beyond people’s common sense. The consequence of the ignorance of plastic issue will be dangerous for human beings. I get many shocking numbers:
“Worldwide, a trillion single-use plastic bags are used each year, nearly 2 million each minute. The amount of energy required to make 12 plastic shopping bags could drive a car for a mile.”
“Currently 100 billion plastic bags pass through the hands of U.S. consumers every year—almost one bag per person each day. Laid end-to-end, they could circle the equator 1,330 times.”
–From Earth Policy Institute
Also, as one of the examples of the dangerous effect of plastic bags pollution, the documentary “Bag It” also shows the number that the plastic bags flew into the ocean kill 100,000 marine lives per year.
Besides the researching data, I also recorded the kinds of plastic bags I use in my life and highlights the kinds, which I haven’t noticed before or even I didn’t know they are plastic. Here is the result: package for food, the package for delivery, the package for clothes, the package for trash, etc. They are too common and frequently used by us. And we always throw them away after getting what we need inside the bags. That leads to the result that we did not realize we are using plastic bags and what kind of function we are using for. I take it for granted that they should be there but actually they are artificial, which means they don’t exist in the world before. In addition, I didn’t realize that the soft packages for holding fruits are plastic.
For the making process, I research how to make a dress on YouTube. What I got and follow is the video below:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De__8EfcqIg
Inspired by the creator, I decided to make the dress by making the top and the bottom of the dress separately.
Making Process
- Materials
I mainly use black plastic bags for my project. So the first thing I did is to try my best to collect big plastic bags as many as possible. I mainly collected materials from the corner of the fabrication lab.I mainly collect bubble wraps, plastic bags of food delivery, plastic bags of package, transparent plastic bags and plastic bags for suitcase.
- Dealing with the raw materials
- Bottom
I firstly deal with the material for the bottom. In my design, I need a huge black plastic cloth for dress, and it should be strong enough so as to be melt by heated iron and fuse other plastic bags into its surface. So I chose the plastic packages of delivery, which is stronger than normal plastic bags. I cut them and stretched them onto a flat surface.
Then I fuse them into a long piece of cloth.
However, the thickness of that cloth was still not enough for melting as I tested. So I made the decision to melt bubble wrap onto the inner side because bubble warps have two layers.
I use both long bubble wrap and a small circle wrap.
After that basic processing of raw materials, I put my bottom dress material onto the model and use heating iron to make the flat piece a conjunct bottom dress and use pins to stabilize it.
To decorate the bottom dress, I covered the coarse surface of the package plastic with big trash plastic bags and small trash bags to make a second layer like waves.
These extra trash plastic bags comes from my research on NYUSH trash sorting. I asked Ayis and knew that Ayis will change the trash plastic bags in the trash bin at a certain frequency even though the plastic bags are not full. So I asked them to provide me the plastic bags which were polluted, clean and going to be replaced every day. By this means, I collected many black plastic bags for decoration.
Here is a small design: I cut the logo, symbol, and even QR codes on the plastic bags off and melt them into the inside of second layer plastic bags, meaning that people usually only know that they are using plastic bags (the surface plastic bags) but cannot realize plastic bags are everywhere in every aspect of life (many icon, symbol, logo from different plastic bags melt onto the inside of second layer plastic waves).
examples:
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- Top
I have an easy design for the top. I used the same method to deal with raw materials, to make and to stabilize the body model. The thing different from the bottom is that I chose a transparent, soft feeling but strong in quality plastic bags.
I made this into one tube top. Besides, I used plastic bags for the suitcase, which felt like leather, to make a belt to connect the top and the bottom. I cut a long piece off leather from the whole bags. However, thing is that the piece was two-layers but not one layer fabric for belt. So I used sewing machine to sew it into together.
The last design was the slogan on the chest: “We only have one earth”. I found this slogan by accident on one plastic bag.
Conclusion
We don’t need to overemphasize the harm of plastic bags, because we have heard many reports or theories about it, and we all know what the consequences will be. But the reason why people are still indifferent to plastic bags issue is that they have gradually lost their awareness of their use. People take it for granted that using plastic bags is normal. It’s hard to change. What I hope is to bring the awareness and consciousness of using plastic bags back to people.
Reference
“Bag It” documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1612246/
Plastic Bags Fact Sheet: http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/press_room/Plastic_Bags.pdf
I MADE A DRESS OUT OF TRASH BAGS! (Inspired by Amber Scholl):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De__8EfcqIg
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