Tidal Shift 

The main idea that guided my artwork was the prompt from the Tidal Shift competition, making a piece of work about or finding a solution about the climate crisis. In this case the work I made was supposed to be a commentary on our tendency to produce a lot of unnecessary waste because a lot of manufactured materials are single use. This piece is both about the waste that is created, the production, and finally how it all ends up in landfills and the ocean so much so that we are now drowning in it. There is not just plastic in this piece but also a lot of pieces of scrap paper. I find that the harm that paper mills cause is often overlooked unless you've ever seen one. The smog and carbon emissions they excrete, the chemical byproducts that often poison rivers, and the fact that a lot of paper is never recycled. All around single use materials contribute to the climate crisis and I wanted to emphasize that. 

The basis of this piece is a structure made out of thick artist paper that fits around my neck. It goes almost all the way around my neck and then up my chin stopping just before my lower lip. It's faced in the back by a button raised by hot glue and a rubber band that can go around it on the other side. The visible part covering the entire piece is clean pieces of trash I collected over the week we were making this. I chose this because it was a good way of utilizing the waste of cores to emphasize the message of one use waste that's created. There are candy wrappers, bubble wrap, loose pieces of packaging plastic, cardboard, and paper from ads in magazines. The headpiece I made but was not used in the final piece is a crochet line of sharing with hot glue, soda can tabs, and a bottle cap attached to it.   

The "paper neck brace" structure that goes around my neck took two tries to get right. The first time I worked from the top down trying to make a ring that could sit slanted on my face, because at the time I had a very different idea of what the photo should look like with me leaning to the side. This did not work so I started working from the bottom up, this created the structure I needed. The trash on the paper structure goes up far enough to cover my mouth and is starting to cover my nose to represent that we are literally drowning in trash but there still might be hope. For the photoshoot I hung some dark blue fabric up, and changed the color of my lights to a light blue hue, this was to make the whole thing seem cold. I stare directly at the camera  with shock, but can't say anything.