A brief contemplation of archival art materials and provenance viewed in light of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
I was talking to a ceramic artist once about his work and what motivated him to use the materials that he did. He told me about the shards of pottery that archaeologists dig up from ancient kitchen middens and how he liked to think that his work would be discovered many years hence in some similar excavation. He explained that working with ceramics ensured the preservation of his work like no other medium, that the archival was inherent in his creations without a lot of complex tactics.
Our conversation got me thinking about my own work and how I view the long-term stamina of the things that I make.
This topic has come up again and again for me in art classes where the instructor expounds upon best practices for creating work out of stable, neutral pH materials with the goal of providing quality products for the market. Artwork is expensive. It exists in an economy of generational provenance. Your great-grandchildren should be able to enjoy both its value and its enduring aura.
I think that the impulse to create something lasting is perfectly valid. I enjoy the pieces of art that have been passed along to me and hope that others will be able to appreciate them after I am gone. I own two paintings by my cousin, the late Suzanne Biggins, which I have transported from place to place with the utmost loving care. She painted the canvases fat-over-lean while living on an island in the Puget Sound, and I hope that one day someone will want to bring the quiet, observant spirit that resides in her work into their lives.
But when it comes to the pieces that I make, I feel caught between the duty to produce something durable and the desire to embrace the more temporal and drifting nature of things.
Once while beach combing along the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, I began to pick up pieces of castaway plastic that lay embedded in the sand, eschewing the shells for what I considered to be the more interesting artifacts of the sea’s grinding force. Each of these objects seemed pregnant with forgotten moments — the bottle cap bouncing off the deck and into the water or the spent firework returning to the dark sand while the party moves on to more spectacular displays. Creatures of the sea abandon their shells for better ones, and we leave our traces as well.
The colors of these human-made seashells are truly beautiful. The palette used in many plastics tends to be garish and demanding, engineered to compete for our attention. However, after the sea has its way with the substance for a while, the bright hues desaturate and soften. The yellows sit more comfortably against the blues and reds, and the whole effect is beachy, wind-swept, like everything else subject to the salty spray. It is the graceful way that things age in brutal weather.
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, great flotillas of plastic drift in the relatively stable waters that form on insides of circular ocean currents. Apparently, the bulk of this plastic cannot be seen by the human eye because it is comprised of tiny particles. Fish and other sea life digest the molecules which leach harmful dyes and chemicals, straining ecosystems. Some marine biologists believe that the ocean floor beneath these clouds of atomized refuse is littered with heavier pieces of plastic that lost buoyancy and sank. The scale of the pollution is such that no one has any idea, right now, how to clean it up. 67 ships working 24 hours a day for an entire year would dredge less than one percent of the total volume, according to an article by National Geographic.
The world is a churning machine that indiscriminately grinds things. It is this weathering of the world that signals to us that we are alive. To live is to contribute to this mechanism, and throwing the empty water bottle into the water is an act that creates the ocean of our moment, the only ocean that we will ever know.
There is something a little precious about ancient kitchen middens when placed alongside the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. What is a shard of pottery when our leavings cloud entire oceans with tiny particles of red, yellow, blue, and green?
If I were to say what I imagine is the far future fate of my work it is that it (and its plastic) flows into the sea.