Makenna Christensen
For this piece, I chose to mix traditional acrylic painting with a collage of recycled materials turned into flowers and a 3-D paper snail. In today’s environment and ecosystems, we sadly cannot see the beauty of nature without (usually) also seeing some form of human pollution. Therefore, in Snailed it, I had this idea to have a snail moving across the canvas leaving behind a trail of recycled materials that otherwise would have stayed in the trash cans around my campus. In painting them green, I wanted to depict how many ways our products can be reused, and in the case of my collage painting, I’ve turned it into grass and pebbles. Surrounding the snail I also chose to do a mixed media piece of sustainable art gathering more materials like bottle caps, repurposed cans, unused sheets of paper and can tabs, which all could have been recycled but weren’t. I decided on the rainbow background as if to depict all of the colors of nature reimagined as the colors of today’s consumer culture. The piece essentially asks us what is at stake for our environment if we continue to mass consume materials as we do. Everything collected came from two days of recyclable materials found in trash cans across campus. If we don’t change our ways or realize our part in the ecosystem, we will remain anthropocentric beings claiming to be moral agents, but never giving the proper moral consideration to our living beings or our ecosystem.
