Plastic Fantastic

This is a project I have had in my mind for over a year now and having two weeks off work over Christmas gave me the perfect opportunity to complete the main images.

Wellington has approximately 500 kilometres of coastline and as stunning and beautiful as it is, it’s not difficult to notice plastic pollution and other man-made waste which has either been washed ashore or dropped or blown (Wellington is notoriously windy) onto the beaches.

So over the past year, I have been collecting various pieces of plastic waste which I have found along Wellington’s coastline, with the aim of floating and photographing this material in a fish tank. The work will hopefully help contributed to raising awareness of plastic waste and the impact it has on our oceans.

It took me two weeks to build the props, collect organic material and sand from Wellington’s beaches, build concrete anchors and other devices for holding the plastic in place, and to shoot the total of eight images. Not to mention the minor setback of cracking the tank which had been sitting in my room unharmed for over a year. Each photograph took between 6 to 10 hours to set-up and shoot.

Although the main work is complete, I still intend to photograph ocean flora and fauna which will be superimposed over my plastic ocean scenes, and provide research material on the types of plastic, how they decay in the environment, and what impact, if any, they have on the ocean ecosystem. This will probably take a further three to six months. Below is an example of one of the images and the state that my living room was in for two weeks while I turned it into a photography studio and art/craft workshop!

Once this work is complete I aim to have it exhibited. Any gallery owners out there who would be interested in exhibiting this work, please feel free to get in touch (shameless plug……totally 🙂

This image is a plastic waste replication of an Angler fish. It is produced from a wetsuit hood made from vulcanised rubber and nylon; a builders dust mask; a foam ear plug and two plastic bottle caps.

This is how my living room looked for the two weeks over the Christmas break.