Artist’s Statement
False Food—A Metaphor for Life
The volunteer from the Monterey Bay Aquarium held up a jar for the audience to see. She explained that the colorful plastic pieces filling the jar were collected from the remains of a dead albatross on Midway Atoll. Mistaking plastic debris for food, countless albatross die each year of starvation. This simple demonstration compelled me to bring attention to this problem through photography.
False Food portrays recovered plastic waste in surprising and unfamiliar contexts. It’s my intention that presenting the problem in a different light may promote new ways to think about (and act on) it. Negative images can cause people to feel helpless and overwhelmed, triggering the reptilian brain where clear, ethical thinking is lacking. In this way, warnings about terror can become acts of terror themselves—amplifying fear and blinding us to answers. I believe aesthetically recontextualizing environmental threat opens the heart to stay with the danger and not turn away. I wanted to make something transformative—something that didn’t terrorize consciousness, but elevated it.
Ecologists tell us that everything is connected. We don’t live in isolation, but on an interconnected planet. The issue of ocean plastic (and other environmental issues, such as climate change) transcends political and social boundaries and, as such, should demand our immediate attention. But for many, the warnings don’t transcend economic boundaries.
We live in a disposable society. We also live in a closed ecosystem. What we throw away we ultimately consume—through breathing, drinking, and eating. Unlike organic debris, plastic doesn’t biodegrade. It photo-degrades into smaller and smaller particles, absorbing toxins along the way until it becomes a soup of molecular plastic. At this size, it enters the food chain and we become the albatross. The environment, like humanity, necessitates a win-win solution to survive. Either we all win, or we all lose.
Special thanks goes to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for generously providing the plastic artifacts used in making these images.
