Pablo Picasso once stated that “art washes away the dust of everyday life.” As if like water, art can become a way to polish our minds, clearing away the mundanity of routine and revealing something more soulful. While this ethos of discovery and rebirth is shared by many across the world, there are four creatives in particular who are reimagining objects of daily banality into intimate subjects of complexity. From transforming litter and garbage into breathtaking statements, to mesmerising mosaics, meet the green artists making waves.
Miwa Koizumi
A Japanese artist trained across the world, Miwa Koizumi has dedicated her craft towards creating delicate sea-creatures from the plastic bottles that blemish our oceans. She studied first at Paris in the renowned Ecole Nationale Superieure Des Beaux-Artes, and completed her academic interests at Tokyo’s Tama Arts University. Miwa’s relocation to New York triggered her eco-friendly journey of recycling plastic water bottles. She became inspired by the rubbish that littered the city’s streets. Using heat guns and soldering irons, Miwa has shed the mundanity of the plastic water bottle, going on to exhibit her translucent sea creatures at New York’s Socrates Sculpture Park under the title ‘Waste Not, Want Not’. Her work highlights how we are constantly surrounded by possibilities, if only we make the effort to engage and uncover them.
Arun Kumar
Arun Kumar’s upbringing in the rural Western Ghats of Karnataka in India contrasts with the industrial waste that his art draws on. His projects include using scrap-yard wood to create human figures directly from the uses and abuses of the surrounding earth. A plastic tapestry built from the plastic tops of water bottles manifests another visual shock of the litter that enters our ecosystems. The ‘Droppings and the Dam’ (2018) installation highlights the damming as well as damning impacts of the bottling industry on global water bodies.
Anne Marie Price
In a similar vein, Anne Marie Price embraces the energy of the seas through her masterful mosaics. Replacing traditional ceramics with ocean debris, from broken glass to shells and plastic parts, Anne Marie’s art achieves an ethereal presence as feminine faces, sunset landscapes, and riverscape sceneries are borne from the banal. More recently, her contemporary mosaics have entered somewhat into a water-cycle. In fact we can admire her creation of a surfboard from anthropogenic material removing rubbish, yet simultaneously returning it to the waves. This reinforces how green artists can do their part in the fight towards sustainability, through repositioning marine litter as greater than the sum of its parts when removed from the seas.
Maria Cristina Finucci
Rounding off this exploration into green artists inspired to save our environment and oceans, Maria Cristina Finucci is an Italian artist, architect, and designer playing a significant role in this fight. Born in Lucca and based in Rome, Maria Cristina was inspired by the huge islands of garbage that scar our seascapes to begin her transmedia project named ‘Wasteland’ (2013). Motivated by the ignoral of the Pacific Trash Vortex, her aim was to make this man-made territory into a federal state. Awarded permission by the UNESCO authorities, Maria Cristina planted the flag of her Garbage Patch State, marking the official beginning of the Wasteland project. Her initial statement has led to numerous achievements and installations. We have seen the Garbage Patch state being hosted in the UN Headquarters of New York in 2014. Still, the ‘Bluemedsaurus’, a plastic snake built from the waste of the ocean slithering from Venice’s High Level Conference Bluemed, all the way to the COP 21 conference in Paris. Her Wasteland cycle continues with five million plastic cups contained in metallic cages. They are exhibited on the island of Mozia near Sicily, spelling out ‘HELP’ from a bird’s eye view.
From Plastics to Purpose
Throughout the world and across the chasms of time, the sea has been synonymised with rebirth. The washing away of sins. The calm after the storm. Even the simple act of going down to the beach and watching the waves curl up to the lip of a sandy shoreline, only to be pulled away and smooth over the ground it leaves behind. Not only acknowledging, but actively participating in these depictions, these green artists making waves are each heavily involved with using the sea as a medium to create something new from what once was perceived as waste. Miwa Koizumi’s PET masterpieces; Arun Kumar’s ‘Droppings and the Dam’; Anne Marie Price’s pastiched mosaics; and Maria Cristina Finucci’s monumental Garbage Patch State and Wasteland projects: these each demonstrate how anthropogenic ocean material can be reborn into works of art. While vividly and viscerally demonstrating how the everyday litter that makes one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, these artists generate a deeper dialogue that reinforces the liminal state of our global waters and the devastating impact of man-made pollution. Creating a conversation from the creator to beholder, this engaging yet eerie messaging is something we should all reimagine highly attuned to, if we are to appreciate both the beauty to be found in the seas, as well as question and create the impetus for change to protect our already fragile oceans.
You can find more artists transforming garbage into art here
