Reflection

When I first read the Ocean Awareness Student Contest’s prompt for this year, the first things that came to my mind were powerful images I had seen involving animals ingesting plastic littered in the oceans, including Chris Jordan’s photography series depicting the corpses of albatross chicks arranged around the assorted plastics and manmade items found in their stomachs (Jordan). I wanted to do another take on the work Chris Jordan did with albatrosses, and decided to explore the process of how plastic got into the baby albatrosses’ systems in the first place - by being fed by their parents. I took the characteristically intimate and caring image of a parent feeding its chicks, and replaced the typical fish or tidbit of food with a bottle cap to create a sense of irony and sadness. In an act of caring, what should be raising the chicks to be stronger and healthier, the mother was instead killing them slowly. I kept the colors muted, and made the bottle cap an intense, saturated and shiny red to stand out and call attention to its toxicity. Caught along with the bottle cap is stringy plastic, which the chicks are also eating.

For this piece, I combined pen, colored pencil, and markers. I chose markers for their saturated color and blending ability, pencils to give texture on the beaks and the straw of the nest, and sharp pens to define my coloring and shade through crosshatching.