Author: Cara Giaimo / Source: Atlas Obscura
Jo Atherton’s tapestries can’t be ignored. They’re filled with texture, movement, and color. When placed on the blank walls of galleries, they’re like fishing lures for the eye: visitors will spot them from across the room and hone on in.
“Often, people are drawn to them,” says Atherton. “They don’t quite know what they’re looking at … It’s only when they get up close that they have that shock moment of, ‘Oh my God, it’s rubbish!’”
This is not a judgement. Atherton, a freelance artist based in Bedfordshire, England, literally makes art from garbage. Some of it is old garbage—pieces of pottery and glass from ancient Rome, lent gravitas by the passage of time. Some of it is slightly more recent, like the nests of rope, fishing net, and colorful plastic doo-dads that make up those sneaky tapestries, which she calls “Flotsam Weaving.” She finds all of her materials herself, in the depths of the Thames and along the low-tide lines on Cornwall’s beaches.
Strange as it may sound, it’s a good time to work in washed-up plastic. For one thing, there’s a lot of it: floating plastic bits outnumbered marine plankton six to one way back in 1997, and things have gotten far worse in the two decades since. For another, the public-interest pendulum is swinging towards the issue: over the past few years, cities have done away with single-use bags, and supermarket chains have begun to phase out plastic packaging.
This is especially true in the U.K., Atherton says, where the recent premiere of the nature documentary series Blue Planet II has gotten all sorts of people talking about ocean plastic, even in her inland community of Bedfordshire. (Just yesterday, Wimbledon announced a ban on plastic straws.) And we’ll be talking about it for a while: minus some kind of miraculous microbial intervention, even a thin plastic bag takes hundreds—or maybe thousands—of years to break down.
It is this longevity that draws Atherton the most. “I’ve always been somebody that has collected,” she says, “and I’ve always wondered about the history of objects that I’ve found.” Her time-hopping tendency goes in both directions: “I look to the past, but also to the…
The post The Artist Making Tapestries Out of Aquatic Trash appeared first on FeedBox.