Everything is Fine (plastic side)
Arctic ghostnet plastic, handwritten letters
2019
Statement about the work:
In 2017, I asked teenagers to write letters to adults that expressed their innermost feelings about what was happening to the planet. The letters were strikingly honest. Putting pen to paper unlocks something honest in all of us.
Two years later, I traveled to Svalbard with thirty other artists for the Arctic Circle Residency. The vast, expansive, pristine landscape of the Arctic affected each of us deeply. At the same time, we collected hundreds of pounds of garbage every time we made landfall.
The inherent contradictions of the Arctic — felt by all of us — prompted me to expand the letter project to my comrades on the ship, and then expanded it even further to include gardeners, librarians, biologists, engineers, art historians, landscapers, and more. All wrote personal letters voicing concern, love, fear, anger, wonder, guilt, melancholy, and cautious optimism.
Everything is Fine articulates two sides of one reality we currently face. One side of the wall is an example of consumption at any cost, the other side is a collection of personal inventories that expresses our connection to each other, to animals, to plants, and to our future. Ultimately, the work is neither about the plastic nor the letters. Instead, the materials on each wall represent our relationship to the planet: one of disconnection and one of connection.
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In the end, I brought 50 pounds of just the blue and green ghost-nets, straps, and plastic film (seen in this image) back to the United States.
Everything is Fine (letter side)
150 handwritten letters, shelves, 3D printed bio-poems (selected letters were turned into 3D modeled proteins and printed in PLA plastic)
12 x 11 feet
Letters pictured: 2017 - 2019
Biopoems: collaboration with Sebastian Coccioba, 2017
Images from the 2019 arctic expedition were installed upsidedown on the wall as a way to slow the viewer down and symbolically reorient the typical view of our environment.
Everything is Fine
