Pippa Ward

My work is focussed on the environment, with a particular interest in our use and relationship with single use plastics. I look at man’s inevitable impact on nature by using found plastic bags, bottle tops and found beach plastic … ubiquitous and disposable materials and objects that do untold damage to our environment if discarded and used carelessly. Plastic’s unimaginably long lifespan, coupled with how casually we, as a society treat it, becomes a perfect metaphor for our almost blind overconsumption of the material. In the words of philosopher Roland Barthes … “the essence of an object has something to do with the way it turns into trash”, possibly meaning that once an object has been discarded, and thus absolved of its function, its form becomes brightly visible … out of its original place and freed from its status as a commodity. Once an object is no longer treated in terms of its use/value, the ‘thingness’ and ‘unwantedness’ of an item intensifies. This is when I become interested in it. I acquire plastic by visiting beaches regularly, particularly following a storm. The processes that follow involve mindful taxonomy and grouping to create arrangements that, at times, speak of scientific plates and classification.