Reflection

Reflection

My art piece was inspired by my time living in Mozambique, where I saw the amount of trash that found its way on the beaches. Additionally, I was inspired by the founder and CEO of Just One Ocean organization, David Jones. Before creating this wonderful group, Jones retired from his military career to travel the world taking photographs underwater. His organization focuses on six main categories: plastic pollution, rising sea temperatures and pollution/habitat destruction, over fishing, cetacean capturing, shark finning for business, and large scale slaughter of whales and dolphins. Jones is also a speaker for business sustainability and economic solutions to ocean pollution. He also performs research on scientific and socio-economic aspects of this problem, currently focusing on microplastics in coastal environments. My message to the viewers of this artwork is that it doesn’t take skilled scientists to help resolve our problems, but rather, it takes all kinds of people, even if it just means picking up a bit of trash. Like David Jones, it could spiral into something much greater than cleaning up litter. With the amount of trash that is thrown into the ocean, we get so many microplastics in the water, which are harmful to a large number of species, including ourselves. This mixed with plastic pollution is what led me to create the media for my artwork, which is fabric t-shirts, plastic water bottles, surgical masks from the pandemic, and other bits of trash I collected while living in Mozambique. The piece is a trash-to-treasure representation of how we can recycle our waste into something beautiful.