Uncomfortable Celebration
A weathered plastic toy pony fills the screen and begins to speak. Soon the audience is invited to sing along, in an uncomfortable celebration of plastic. My Little Tragedy transforms plastic pollution from an abstract environmental issue into a shared physical encounter. Humour, rhythm, and collective performance create a sense of playful unease, asking audiences to consider how plastic has embedded itself within oceans, homes, and bodies alike, and whether this material’s extraordinary success should be admired, resisted, or mourned.
Factory To Shoreline
In January 2019 the container ship MSC Zoe lost 342 containers in a storm above the Wadden Islands. Thousands of consumer products washed up along the Dutch and German coasts for months, and material is still surfacing today. The pony in this work comes from that debris, one object among thousands, mass produced to be loved briefly and discarded. Speaking through it is a way of following plastic along the chain it travels: factory, container ship, seabed, shoreline, and back into the room where the audience is standing.
5 Grams A Week
Five grams a week, about the weight of a credit card. That figure has circulated since 2019 and has been argued over ever since, which is precisely the kind of statistic the pony would be proud of. Plastic is in the packaging, the seating, the shoes and the walls of most exhibitions, including this one, too ordinary to notice and impossible to measure cleanly. Rather than a distant crisis at sea, the work treats plastic as something the audience is already surrounded by and already carrying. Nobody is asked to condemn it or defend it. They are handed the lyrics and left to decide.
