BOTTLE CAPS
2010-2019
What to do with all the plastic waste we create? It is made from petroleum. It doesn’t compost or decompose. And what little is recycled creates its own pollution. So Mary Ellen made art with this waste.
CLOSE is a large self-portrait made of 7000+ plastic bottle caps. It took 7 months to build, and two years to collect enough caps.
Her final works were large scale images ecological disasters, also made of bottle caps. Through this work with plastic, she intended to make this waste visible and to make the connection between our throw-away culture and our responsibility to the earth.
“Single-serve plastic bottles are the worst of the worst and should be assiduously avoided,” she wrote. “Excessive packaging comes next. We need to rethink our needs and our desires if we are going to save this planet.”
All works copyright as dated.
