In February 2016, I made a trip to visit dear friends who have retired to Eleuthera, Bahamas, and to scope out a possible project about how coastal communities’ lives are affected by changes in the ocean, including increasing garbage in the water and on the shores and changing marine life migration and availability.
Eleuthera is a long, thin island with beaches running along both the Atlantic and the Caribbean side.
I took some lovely long walks along the island’s many beaches and, especially on the Atlantic side, I found a stunning amount of plastic garbage washed ashore.
I collected the more durable and colorful pieces (only a very few of which are in the image to the left) with thoughts of making a jewelry series (which I still may do). In the meantime, I was visiting during Valentine’s Day, so I made a collage using the warm colors:
Then, since I had so much fun with that image, I made a few fish collages. Perhaps I will use cards with these images to help raise awareness of the problem of plastic in the oceans.
And now I am inspired to make more! One small bag of plastic yields many possibilities. To be continued….
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[...] was struck with the radically different palette of these two pieces. as compared with the ones that I made in Eleuthera. I was hard pressed to find much material in bright colors in Maryland, but in the Bahamas, those [...]