Thank You Have A Nice Day (2020)
Cutout art using littered plastic bags
I pick up plastic bags on the street in NYC, fuse them into a sheet, and make cutout art with them. The Japanese tradition of funeral rites for objects, based on the belief that objects have souls just like humans, plants and animals, has influenced this process of sublimating waste into art. In my artwork, I portray these littered plastic bags as wandering souls, forever trapped in our environment, until an action is taken to set them free.
Litter picking diary that ended up also documenting my life in lockdown NYC during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020:
Kierrätetty Lintu (Recycled Bird) (2019)
Cutout art using found objects
I participated in Vanha Paukku Cultural Center (Kulttuurikeskus Vanha Paukku) artist residency program in Lapua, Finland, for two weeks in December 2019. The studio had an attic as a storage area, and during my stay I created art re-using whatever materials I could find there: leftover old wallpaper, wood scraps, old nails, flyers and paper trash, cardboard, dried plants, etc. I had been using recycled paper and used magazine pages to create my work, but wanted to push my practice further into that direction of re-use. Working with limited resources in the attic gave me better understanding of this practice, and led to my latest project Thank You Have A Nice Day, a series created using littered plastic bags picked up on streets. I am very grateful to Vanha Paukku’s program for being the catalyst.
