Crystalline PlasticRock, 2019

 

Exhibited at: Vitalist Materialism, HOP Projects, Folkestone; and BioDesign Here&Now, London Design Festival, 2018.

 

Plastic, humans supposed wonder-creation, was once a living organism. Ancient marine organisms and biotic components were compacted and cemented by heat and pressure into black crude oil hydrocarbons, which are ultimately processed into plastics. In other words, this substance is made from organic elemental constituents, carbon-based lifeforms.

These once-living things are now ubiquitous in the form of plastics, they are found in honey that bees make and we eat, they flow with the water from our taps, they are distributed throughout the terra, shifted about by human and terrestrial processes.

What does it mean if everything contains plastic? What does it mean that its everywhere? In fish lungs and our pizza.

This looping video expresses the ever-changing and shifting collection of matter which makes up our Earth—from organs to plastics to paint to rock. The image basis is artists acrylic paint that was deep-fried from gloop to crystalline shapes, evoking its once rock-like makeup, the video is an algorithmic drawing of the process of change it undertook.

 

See photos of the Deep Fried Acrylic Paint Tempura.