Summary

In May 2018 my installation GYRE was part of Creative Reactions art/science festival which took place at TENT gallery at Edinburgh College of Art, Evolution house. Gyre is constructed from found marine plastic (PET plastic balloons) collected by me for more than ten years from the same open ocean beach on Block Island, Rhode Island in the USA . This exhibition was the culmination of ongoing research into these objects and included photographs of the site where the balloons were found as well as drawings made from the balloons using a transfer process with lighter fluid that was first pioneered by Robert Rauschenberg.

Description

Gyre came about from observing a mystery: the increasing number of cellophane balloons washing up on a beach near my parent’s home on Block Island, Rhode Island, USA in the summer of 2008. I had been walking this beach for decades and since moving to Scotland in 1990, these walks had become a homecoming ritual.

Southwest Point Beach is a dynamic place, eroding clay cliffs, massive boulders, huge waves rolling in off the Atlantic. We often joked that there was nothing between us and Portugal when we were walking here. And there had always been detritus, driftwood trees, machinery from shipping and the fishing industry, dead animals. But the masses of single use plastic – cellophane balloons often still inflated – was something new in 2008. Instinctively I began to collect the balloons, which were oddly beautiful – the eroded messages and colours, the strange inflated shapes were enticing, humorous, but at the same time horrible. More depressing still, the supply of these objects was endless. No matter how many I collected there were always seemed to be more. I continued collecting these objects for the next 10 years amassing hundreds.

I realised that when deflated, I could roll the balloons up and pack them in my suitcase, and so took them back to my studio in Scotland. Here I experimented with different sculptural forms and automatic drawing techniques – for example the lighter fluid transfers a la Robert Rauschenberg. The meaning, the potential, of these objects still has resonance to me today. The collecting, the experiments became kind of commemorative act – a way to process my mixed feelings about migrating to Scotland, my persistent nostalgia and homesickness.

The existence of these balloons, the scale of the pollution they create is invisible to most of us and presents a conundrum. We must somehow deconstruct our simplest choices, reverse our ‘collective forgetting’, and change what we desire, so that we see that these objects, literally in the wind, sow nothing but destruction.

These ideas went on to inspire my project Casser Maison (breaking the house).