Year of Plastic, Family of Four
2021
Year of Plastic, Family of Four
2021
What does a year's worth of single-use plastic look like? Would it fill a closet? Cover a football field? I had wondered this question since my city began to offer composting services and what remained in my trash can was primarily plastic packaging. So in 2019, I recruited a good friend to help me answer this very question.
Installing Year of Plastic in the Littelton Museum, March 2022
For an entire year, she faithfully collected and washed her family’s single-use plastic, sending me a tidy package every month. I pieced together the contents of each package she sent in the spirit of a “crazy quilt,” sorting by color and month each piece was collected. The resulting assemblage, 26 feet long and 26 feet wide, is a playful but serious look at just how much plastic slips through our hands on an annual basis.
Depending on how it's displayed, visitors are encouraged to walk among the rows, finding treats and familiar family brands as well as novel products they’ve never seen. It’s also a profoundly intimate piece, documenting the very personal decisions the family made as they nourished their bodies, and a year in their life when they moved every three months as part of a traveling job one parent held. It documents travel for leisure, for a family funeral, and for work. It displays regional differences in food choices available across the United States.
Year of Plastic on view at DSST Montview High School, Denver, CO
No matter who you are or what your life circumstances are, the comparisons to your own habits and behaviors are inevitable.