I have been collecting plastic straws over the past year or so. Because they are straight, hollow, and flexible and come in colors, they could be an ideal material for one of my bird’s nests or some other work. And the controversy over plastic straws as ocean waste (that awful image of a straw stuck in the nostril of a sea turtle…) heightened public awareness of casual straw use as superfluous and harmful. So straws were an obvious choice for me to use for my work: colorful, readily available as used material, and politically relevant.
As of January 2019, Washington, DC, made it harder for me to find straws, since they have instituted a ban on them at restaurants in response to the outcry over their contribution to ocean waste. Even though straws actually are only a small portion of the plastic waste we produce, their shape and size can be particularly devastating when they are waste, so I don’t have a big problem with banning them. They are, for the most part, a luxury, and there are paper and metal alternatives for people who really need straws in their lives - people who have had jaw surgery, for example. And ice cream sodas wouldn’t be half as much fun without a straw, but maybe paper or metal straws can replace the plastic ones, especially if yo heat/drink quickly.
But without plastic straws at restaurants, my supply would swindle! Fortunately (or not!), I have a reliable source of used straws. My friend Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith is living with ALS - believe me, she needs use plastic straws, no question about it. She and her mom, Karin, are saving straws for me to use in my artwork. Lindsay is an amazing artist and healer. Here are her links, in case you want to learn more about her. Her videos about living in isolation have been very centering and comforting to me during the pandemic.
Paper or Plastic? Installation Summer 2019
Paper or Plastic? Takoma Park Community Center, 2019
Detail of Paper or Plastic?
In the summer of 2019, I got to use some of my straws in an installation called Paper or Plastic? at the Takoma Park Community Center. The piece addressed the themes of personal choice (online or printed newspapers, paper vs plastic grocery bags or straws) – how we consume the news (and other things), literally and figuratively. I fused layers of plastic newspaper sleeves from the Washington Post and New York Times, and strung the square collages together with reclaimed plastic straws as spacers to create a structure reminiscent of both the assembly machinery for newspapers and prayer flags. The colors change gradually and slightly over time, each morning presenting the newspaper subscribers with a new shade, but the change seems inconsequential and has nothing to do with the news content it protects.
I am intrigued by the large potential impact of small tendencies or habits on our environment, in this case, the impulse to carefully preserve the daily paper by wrapping it in plastic. As we read in the hardcopy newspaper about the impacts of increasingly overwhelming plastic garbage and the effects of plastic production, we are left with flimsy but beautiful bits of plastic that, even if it can be recycled, often end up as microplastics in the very environments we are learning about.