An artist’s job is to create art, but it isn’t always to literally make it.
As an artist I have made most of my own work. I don’t mean that I came up with it, or that I worked through the creative process until I reached an end point. I mean I have literally made the work, crafted the end point.
Many artists make use of professional workshops and technicians, experts in whatever medium they are working in. There are photo labs, print workshops, foundries, digital suites, fabrication labs, book binders. Every art form has a corresponding professional who has spent years learning the production and craft needed to make that art a reality.
Yet, apart from photo labs, I’ve never had the need or desire to turn to others to craft my end point. I have chosen to work with materials I know how to use, be it in a studio, a workshop or at my kitchen table, all because I like the process of making. For me making is part of art, it is part of how I understand an idea, part of how I refine my work, part of how I come to the next idea and the one after that.
The Seagrass Walk has changed that. I had an idea I had no way of making with my own hands. An idea I loved enough to seek out expert help, to learn how you turn to others with ideas and sketches, how you trust them with your art.
It has turned out to be one of my favourite parts of this incredible project, and all because I found Ocean Plastic Technologies. They have understood my vision, responded to my needs, and taken my sketches to places I wouldn’t have known how to get to.
Let me tell you a little them. Ocean Plastic Technologies are helping to find a solution to plastic waste by rethinking recycling. They reclaim ocean-bound and waste plastic in rural communities in South Africa, communities where plastic pollution is a massive problem. They offer unemployed women the opportunity to generate sustainable incomes by running plastic waste collection points. This plastic is then processed and sold into the existing supply chain to be remanufactured into new products. Essentially, they are creating a circular economy that will help our waterways, oceans and ultimately our planet to recover.
In the early stages of the The Seagrass Walk, when I was still working through different possibilities for the space, trying to create a cohesive installation, I had an idea for light-based art. I wanted to immerse the entire space in a sense of the ocean, taking inspiration from the shape and concept of the tanks around the aquarium, these windows into water.
I realised that the best and safest way to do this would be with plastic rather than glass, but plastic and ocean art seemed utterly wrong. That was until I followed the thread of a memory. This led me from the Glastonbury stage and kayaks made of recycled ocean plastic down a rabbit hole of companies until I found Ocean Plastic Technologies.
With their aid and expertise, I will have the very thing I imagined, light art inspired by the ocean. I have learned a new way to make art. I have learned that leaning on others for production doesn’t make it any less mine. I have learned that I enjoy watching the end point of my ideas materialise just as much when it is happening in a workshop far away. I have learned that working in this way is just as inspiring, and just as likely to result in the next big idea.
I can’t wait to see the final products arrive on UK shores, and to install them in the aquarium. Mostly, I can’t wait to turn the lights on.
this looks fantastic Rosie, what a great journey you are on. oxoxo
Win-win all the way round ... love this Rosie .... greetings from Mexico ... xxx