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View ProfilesPublished August 2, 2023 at 10:00 a.m. | Updated December 15, 2023 at 3:13 p.m.
In the classic film The Graduate, young Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) receives a succinct career tip from an older businessman: "Just one word ... plastics." But in 1967, neither of them could have fathomed how far beyond Tupperware plastic production would go. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, more than 400 million tons of plastic are produced annually for a variety of products — many of them single-use. Fourteen million tons of that plastic end up in the Earth's oceans every year.
That's to say nothing of the degraded microplastics that are now ubiquitous, even in our bloodstreams. What's an earnest but demoralized recycler to do?
One good option is to go see Aurora Robson's "Human Nature Walk" at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. Not only does the artist maneuver plastic into gorgeous, innovative sculptures but she is also a plastic activist (plastivist?).
Her work may keep only a tiny fraction of the material out of landfills and oceans, but Robson's reframing of the problem as possibility makes an impact. Alongside creating her own art, she champions plastic as a worthy — and even necessary — medium in the broader art world through an organization she founded called Project Vortex. After all, polyethylene terephthalate — aka PET — has archival integrity: It will never break down.
Robson considers the overwhelming debris "displaced abundance," curator Katherine Gass Stowe writes in a gallery statement. In a society that is conditioned to believe that more is better and new is best, "our tendencies towards abundance have created a global crisis of chaotic displacement." But Robson "intentionally redirects [plastic's] incessant flow into something less harmful and more beautiful and meaningful," Stowe writes.
Dozens of Robson's freestanding, wall-hung or suspended sculptures transform the large front gallery space at BMAC. Cut, shredded, frilled and molded from a variety of erstwhile functioning plastic items, they eschew representation. Some of them suggest exotic sea creatures; others seem inspired by flowers or fungi or microorganisms.
The sculptures are monochromatic or bundles of closely related hues. Robson made that aesthetic choice because of the accompanying bottle caps: Thousands of them are sorted by color and piled into shallow bins on the floor. These round or waterdrop-shaped containers are scattered about the gallery.
Robson's exhibitions often include an interactive component; in this case, BMAC invited the public to save, clean and bring in their own bottle caps for the show. The segregation of colors gives these common discards a surprising strength-in-numbers coherence.
On one side of the gallery, where predominantly blue pieces are installed, the low-lying compartments corral caps in a range of gemlike hues, from aquamarine to sapphire. Surrounded by these bins, three curvy vermicular shapes, titled "Troika," rise up like giant earthworms. Except these worms are blue-striped and illuminated from within by LEDs.
Nearby, a couple of stand-alone assemblages on the floor somehow look sassy, while volumetric wall-hung pieces resemble strange botanical arrangements, tropical fish or minor explosions. One wall piece, constructed of white packing straps, is like a weaving gone rogue.
A similar assortment of sculptures in a range of orange-reds occupies the other side of the gallery, while in a third space, pretty white and transparent objects dangle like ornaments from a skylight.
Robson, 51, is not the first or only artist to turn trash into treasure, but the variety of her manipulations of a single material is impressive and expressive. As Stowe puts it, "Robson collects, cleans, sorts, bends, cuts, rivets, sews, extrudes, welds, rips, ties, nests, dangles, illuminates, stacks, sculpts, pools and coaxes plastic ... into new forms and formations."
Born in Toronto and raised on Maui, Robson had what she has described as a troubled childhood with attendant nightmares. She escaped that to earn degrees in visual arts and art history at Columbia University in New York City. There, as she explained in a 2014 TEDx talk, Robson began to use "the formal structures of the nightmares to explore harmonious compositions." She now lives in Hudson, N.Y., with her husband and daughters, ages 15 and 11.
The CV on Robson's website chronicles a nonstop stream of exhibitions, as well as teaching and lecturing gigs and volunteer advocacy work. Numerous institutions and corporations have collected her sculptures — including a recent installation of 36 illuminated "mushrooms" at Amazon's Metropolitan Park in Arlington, Va.
In a phone call, Robson elaborated on her passion for plastic.
The idea of using waste seems to have been with you for a long time.
I had a nontraditional past to get to my life as a professional artist. Part of it was going to Columbia University, immersed in all this incredible art in New York. Having grown up in Hawaii and being Canadian, I was appalled at all the trash. I came at it initially as an artistic exploration rather than an environmental stance.
A sentence in your bio describes your work as "a formal meditation on recurring nightmares" that you had as a child. Are you willing to reveal what those nightmares were?
Sure. My childhood was really complicated. Despite living in a tropical paradise, I lived in a state of fear, experiencing racism as a white person living in Hawaii — I was in the minority. [The nightmare was] a knot that continued in all directions, growing, shapeshifting, morphing. It was suggestive of but not literal forms. I thought it was going to suffocate me.
In 2012, I was teaching in public school in Columbus, Ohio, and [talked about this]. Half the kids came up to me afterward and said they had the same nightmare. It's a common response to trauma. It was a revolutionary moment to learn other people had these nightmares.
I was already working with debris, so my idea became to transform the nightmare into art. It was very therapeutic for me, and I thought other people could relate.
You may be the only person I've heard of who has turned bad dreams into a career!
[Laughing.] I didn't think about them as bad dreams after I filtered them into my artwork. I'm taking garbage, which is suffocating natural resources and all species ... and recognizing that there's potential to go in a different direction.
Are there objects in particular that you favor for their qualities, shapes or how readily they can be manipulated?
Yeah, for sure. I gravitate toward high-density polyethylene and PET. Those are the two most common types of plastic and are used in the most familiar things that people would come into contact with. There are some toxic forms I avoid.
Does plastic, in fact, ever break down?
No, not as far as we're aware. It photodegrades, not biodegrades — that is, it breaks down into smaller and smaller particles. They can now enter into food streams and bloodstreams.
Are there things or living organisms that inspire your sculptures and assemblages?
Oh, yeah. I'm so grateful because, once I discovered the nightmares weren't just mine, it liberated me to look for inspirations in the natural world — the woods, the cosmos, microorganisms. I have a telescope and a microscope in my studio. And I've spent a lot of time going on forages for mushrooms.
Given that plastic is ubiquitous, this might seem like a dumb question, but where do you get your plastic?
It depends on the project. For example, with some projects I'll work with a community. They'll collect a bunch of plastics for me, and I'll make a piece for them. [I work with] river cleanup groups, Girl Scouts, etc. Sometimes people send me things. Sometimes I work with recyclers.
It's beautiful because people want to do something about [the waste]. That's what keeps me going. Otherwise, it can get really depressing.
A lot of your creations remind me of Dale Chihuly's amazing glassworks. But I don't believe I saw any glassblowing in your background.
Glass is amazing. I did a little glassblowing in Brooklyn, but it's really bad for the planet.
Katie's curator statement contains a litany of action verbs to describe the ways you manipulate plastic. Could you give an example of how you made a specific piece?
There's a really sweet piece called "Quinn." I collect a large quantity of something over time, and I had amassed a bunch of what I call "membranes" — the thin mesh layer inside bottle caps. I love their semitransparent quality. I turned a bunch of those into fish. I airbrushed them and configured them into a kind of mass. This little boy named Quinn, who was 5 or 6, had asked his mom to send the mesh to me.
What does your studio look like?
It's actually the basement of my home. It has some relatively large windows, an office. Outside, I have a shipping container [for storing] some of my finished pieces.
The Brattleboro Museum is giving you its Award for Service to Art & Humanity — a grand name! What was your reaction to learning that?
I was completely floored — flabbergasted! I feel that I've barely scratched the surface of anything. It's really encouraging, and I'm really excited and honored.
One last question: Plastic and other forms of pollution are undeniably ugly. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, your work is beautiful. Can you speak to that?
Thank you. There are two parts: One, if I'm going to make a piece of art, I'm going to have to be looking at it, and I don't want to be surrounded with ugliness. Also, if people are going to be engaged in a conversation about this, I want to show them the potential rather than the problem. We all know what the problem is.
Aurora Robson, "Human Nature Walk," on view through February 11, 2024, at Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. Robson receives the museum's Award for Service to Art & Humanity during the annual gala on Saturday, August 19. brattleboromuseum.org, aurorarobson.com
The original print version of this article was headlined "Plastic Fantastic | Aurora Robson turns a ubiquitous material into unique artworks in "Human Nature Walk""
Tags: Art Review, Talking Art, Aurora Robson, Human Nature Walk, plastic, Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
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