Plastics are miraculous…and they are everywhere. We buy new plastic things and dispose of our used ones almost every day of our lives. Often our disposed-of plastics end up where we do not want them (at best) or where they can cause serious ecological harm (at worst). As miraculous as plastics are, our global will has been slow to address the negative impacts that non-biodegradable plastics have had on our planet. The recycling of specific types of plastic has been an option for decades now, but most (90-95%) of the plastic that consumers believe they are recycling never finds its way into a renewed form. It just ends up in a landfill.

When people ask me about my recycled plastic paintings I like to jokingly tell them, “I am saving the planet one painting at a time.” I find the idea of saving the planet through the recycled nature of my art humorous. I am not deluded as to think that the plastic from which my artwork is formed makes any measurable dent in the amount of plastic that daily finds its way into landfills across the planet. Though it is true that I recycle many types and forms of plastics that are not normally recycled, what captivates me in the process of making my paintings is the sheer beauty derived from the most ordinary, discarded, and forgotten things. What was once a branded, utilitarian twist cap on a Diet Coke® becomes in my work a blush of silver in a sea of white that is itself formed out of mottled layers of melted Target® bags. Where others only see something to be discarded because it has lived out its consumer-driven utility, I see color, texture, and the potential for beauty. In my work I take something as insignificant as a vacuum-formed piece of thermoplastic (made to be consumed, discarded, and subsequently forgotten) and re-form it — in community with other things regarded as nothing — into a visual space where one might experience a moment of transcendent beauty; a beauty that is formed out of  the transformed inconsequential, forgotten, and ordinary plastic things of this world.