When I was looking at some eco artists I found a work done by the Eden Project near St Austell, Cornwall, UK. I haven’t been able to find a lot of information about it, but I thought the work was really interesting. The work is a polar bear sculpted from recycled plastic bags.
If you know anything about this work please let me know.
Work Cited:
David Mach
While searching for artists that have focus on the theme sustainability I found David Mach. He is a fine artist that uses coat-hangers to create his large and intrusive sculptures. Mach states on his website that he “believe that an artist must be an ideasmonger responding to all kinds of physical location, social and political environments, to materials, to processes, to timescales and budgets.” I believe that everyone in the world is responding to some sort or event is issue that surrounds us; it is very difficult for us, as humans to ignore the influences around us, its natural. We can see that this artist has responded to the issues that surround us, being sustainability by recycling materials to be used in a new form then it was initially intended. Mach likes to work with a variety of materials. He stated that “It’s no understatement to say I am a materials junkie – jumping from highly-painted realistic cast fibreglass pieces to sculpture with coathangers, to a thatched barn roof laced with fibre-optics to designs for camera obscuras (or at least the buildings to house them) and layouts for parks.” He will use any material to form something new; he will adapt to the world around him to create his masterpieces much like politicians, businessmen and doctors.
Here is some of his hanger series:
Here is a different approach he takes to using found material to create his works:
Work Cited:
“We are the Landscape” – Steven Siegal
Steven Siegal is an American fine artist that uses recycled material and pre-consumer products such as, newspapers, crushed soda cans, shredded rubber to create his public art installations in our landscape. He “reinvents the role of sculpture for an eco-conscious planet… that reflects the deposit-and-decay cycle that underlines the making of the land.” Siegal has created these works all over the world in places like, Europe, Asia, and North America. His main objective is to create a conversation about the landscape and how our society is affecting it.
His sculptures act as interventions within our landscape, we have to stop and address the “elephant in the room” that is waste consumption. There is a subtly to some of his works, specifically the ones that blend into the landscape, that I believe parallels the concealed issue of waste within out society. As scene in previous blogs and articles I have read, it is very difficult for us to see the mass consumption and issue that is waste and landfills because its impossible to physically see it all at once, but just because we cannot see it doesn’t mean its there.
In a way his work is acting as a solution by recycling material to create something new. His first objective is to show the world its waste but his underline message provides a solution of recycling or some sort of waste management. As I have scene while researching this topic, there are plenty of solutions to tackle this issue, and it seems to all point back to recycling and how we discard or reuse materials.
“Sited Works” Series
Work Cited:
Its Not Easy Being Green 