June 2015 · Process
Notes from the studio floor — Anthropocene fragments
Plastic as a future strata sample. On the slow process of casting found objects into plaster and the question of which decade you would, if pressed, like to leave behind for the geological record.
The series began with a bag of plastic pulled out of a Glasgow canal. I had not planned to make the work. The bag sat in the studio for a fortnight, and then I started casting from it.
Plastic, on the micro scale, is a material symbol of our modern times. On the macro scale, it is a piece of the deep past — the compressed micro-organic record of the Carboniferous, expelled and refined. To cast it into plaster is to fold one geology into another.
Each fragment is roughly the size of a hand. They are meant to be picked up. They are not meant to be precious. The piece is interested less in lament than in the strange flatness of the fact: this is what we are leaving behind, and this is what it looks like.