One of my own projects for the Out of the Ordinary festival was to bring along lots of unwanted and unloved plastic waste.
My focus was to challenge the festival goer about plastic. I really wanted to make people think about the alarming abundance of plastic that we use on a daily basis, which, when it reaches the end of its life, is planet destroy land fill.
Now when I say plastic, I didn't want to use plastic that we normally associate with waste, such as plastic milk bottles, food packaging or thinks that we would call 'junk'. I wanted to use plastic that we form an emotional attachment to...vinyl records, video and cassette tape.
It really interests me how shocked and distressed people often get when they see the work that I have done with recycled vinyl records - childhood memories melted and re worked into pieces of art as you have never imagined. I love the juxtaposition of how one type of plastic becomes "almost criminal" to destroy, yet another piece of plastic, well, its only role from beginning to end is junk.
I am fascinated with using this treasured precious plastic to make large installation pieces that really question our attachment to plastic itself and I hope this work really make us think about the ultimate destruction that this material is doing to our world.
So the 'To Create is to Distroy' project was born, and the Out of the Ordinary festival seemed like the ideal place to execute it.
My first project was a very large, and heavy organic form make from melted vinyl records.
The form is made in two pieces, so they can be adapted for a number of applications.
I was really fascinated by people reactions when they saw the piece; nnostalgia, happy childhood memories and excitement along with sadness and shock that their once treasured musical memories are now in a different and challenging form - re fashioned and unplayable.
When chatting to most of these people, I discovered that most people do not even own a vinyl player.
Now that's something to think about.
My second project was made from cassette tape.
This piece is a comment on how we make wonderful, thought provoking and often life changing music but produce it on a form that is heading for landfill and ultimately destroying the planet.
All of the tapes used in this piece were hand recorded mix tapes – I imagine a lot of love and energy went in to making them.
I loved how ghostly the piece looked at night time. Most people approaching the installation had no idea until they were practially touching it that it was made from old cassettes.
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