STATEMENT

With the earth’s resources being a direct source of human life, the discernment of our actions toward earth itself is crucial. Without taking the earth’s health into consideration, our health will forever be impacted negatively. My installation piece, Unconscious Consumption, highlights the oblivious consumerism that we take part in on this earth. The plastics that we use in everyday life are what the space is created out of. Its objective is to instill the feeling of being trapped. The hopes are to bring awareness of the mass amounts of toxic unnecessary materials around us and the fact that we are the cause for it. It explores abundance, confusion of space and elements that inflict the feeling of being trapped. I was collecting used plastic through a university wide donation that was graciously made possible through the help of some earth-conscious individuals. Due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus, a halt was put to that piece. Collecting these used plastics could pose a threat to me and those involved due to the easily spread COVID-19.

When my abilities to progress this work were taken away, I switched gears to work in a digital way. In the piece Isolated Waste, I collected plastic in a new sense, through digital photography. The abundance of the photos is to exhibit the ubiquity of these toxic materials in our natural environment. The scope of what is essential to us humans has been revealed during this time of prioritizing what we deem as essential. The mass amounts of trash on roadsides and highways show that our earths health may be pushed to the side to focus on human’s health. But with an unhealthy earth, we will be unhealthy too. And although unseen, these plastics leech toxins into our earth, inevitably coming back to us through the food we eat, the soil we walk on and waters we drink and swim in and the air we breathe. Within the series of collected photos, I have left words of frustration and information to what these materials really mean and what they are doing to us and this place we call home.

My work evokes thought surrounding the relationship humans have had with nature in the past versus now. Have we figured out the pollution problem? The proper way to dispose of industrial or agricultural waste? Do we need to use such wasteful products? This dates back to the first environmental movement, are all humans going to finally consider their health and the health of the future generations?