Artists and Plastic!

Fion Gunn, Displaced no 8, 2020, mixed media, 51.5x25x35cm

It always pains me when I see plastic toys dumped on the side of the road, they can't be burned, when broken they're difficult to repair or to recycle (depending on what your local council can do) and so they just add to the growing heap of plastic rubbish. I try to wage war against this - well, in a very small way. If I find a discarded plastic toy boat I take it back to my studio to transform it.
In this case I started with the hull and covered it with raw linen which I had dipped in paint. I removed the deck, masts and other bits and pieces to use in another imagined vessel,  then I built an underwater landscape and the surrounding rocks.
The transformed vessel with its inland sea has a mast made from cinnamon which supports the last piece of green vegetation to be seen in a world which has been totally flooded. A boat with the remnant of humanity floats on water which covers a deluged city teeming with fish and algae. I wanted to capture that nightmare scenario to which climate change could lead, poetically and in miniature. The viewer is scaled up and becomes a giant with a different perspective - one in which they have power.
I have never exhibited this piece! I completed it just before the outbreak of COVID in 2020 and the exhibition in Paris in which it was to feature was cancelled. 
On World Environment Day it feels like the right piece to feature in this Blog and here's the link to website's Beat Plastic Pollution page.
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