Sculpture! Abstract! Plastic!

'Explore the qualities, characteristics, performance, use symbolism, or any other metaphorical observation that appeals to you, with regard to a particular material. Use these insights to create an abstract object/ sculpture in any materials'

Keeping plastic at the forefront of my mind I began by writing down the words that were inspired by this material as well as making some initial quick sketches. I did research on plastics to educate myself about this material, which helped me to formulate an opinion.

As humans created plastic I was inspired to use some sort of hand concept, representing their part in the material and their ultimate control over it.

The words that were generated were quite negative, however, I was advised to take another look starting from when it was first introduced,. This was interesting as it helped to give me a more balanced opinion and I was able to look at the pros and opportunities it brought to society. This went on to influence my use of colours, thinking of the bad and the good, black and white.

There are parts of the world that appear to be more impacted by plastics than others and I wanted to represent that in the sculpture, originally I wanted to create my own globe with the land and sea, however, I felt this was too literal and chose to go with a simple sphere, that symbolically represents the Earth.

My finished sculpture ended up being made entirely from plastic, the black and white parts around the sphere were sculpted out of cut up recycled milk cartons, melted in the oven and the final shapes being created with a heat gun and attached together with a glue gun.

The first sphere I made was from paper mâché, but it didn't have the finished look I desired. I also thought it would be good to make the whole sculpture from plastic materials, so I made a new sphere out of fibre glass using an old ladle as a mould.

The part that looks most like a hand is white because I wanted to convey plastic having a positive effect on the people of the world and other half is black because it has a worse impact on the earth. The black and white merge into each other to represent that there is no clear line between good and bad. This material has as many positives as it has negatives in the present time.