Material Drift explores the natural cost of the human convenience of plastic, and the worldwide journey of this effluvia in its myriad forms transported by ocean currents.
My project begins in the remote coastal areas of Hawaii’s least inhabited islands, documenting the mountains of plastic that the ocean is now regurgitating. The world’s ocean currents bring an astonishing array of marine debris that collects on the isolated southernmost tip of the Hawaiian Islands, captured en route to the infamous North Pacific Gyre. The currents transport and mix the debris into a colony of drifters that temporarily alight and gather on the beaches, an amazing and shocking visual array of the material of global consumerism. I clean beaches, removing this material from the natural environment and re-situate it within the cultural context.
I see the debris as a portrait of global late-capitalist consumer society. The plastic elements initially seem attractive and innocuous, like toys, some with an eerie familiarity and some totally alien. At first, the plastic seems innocent and fun, but it is not. It is dangerous.
The photo ‘portraits’ are very close-up images of the actual debris as sad yet beautiful relics of human cultural anthropology. Physically seeing the material makes one look at it from a different perspective. As we see images of common things like combs and tooth- brushes, we recognize ourselves in these everyday objects that have been force-fed to the ocean. The project serves to catalog this debris, and its odd transformation as the ghosts of our disposables resurface. It is a timely look at our material artifacts and their collision with nature, at once changed by the process, and changing the very substance of the earth and its creatures.
