Untangle Man
Screen print and acrylic paint on paper
42” x 89”
2023

This piece sprouted from my Ghost Gear series, which utilizes fishing industry and pedestrian plastics to create biomorphic, flowing compositions. As I was making this piece I was contemplating the shift in awareness of plastic pollution in the ocean. It was really hot for a while to talk about the big stuff—the gyres and patches of large debris. It looks horrible. It is horrible—but perhaps more terrifying is the small stuff. We’re now seeing plastics bioaccumulate at a ridiculously small scale in some of the most intimate places of life.

When I started making my Ghost Gear series about a decade ago, I was reflecting on how abundant and commonplace seeing this stuff along the coast was. It’s become a part of our experience of the natural landscape. It’s seemingly irrevocably part of our ecosystems. Now, at a substantially smaller scale, it’s in us too. We eat it. We breath it. It flows through us.

So I imagined a future entity, a monster of sorts—mirroring the physiology of humans and aquatic life, but composed of plastics. Powered by swirling ocean gyres and the accumulation of plastic throughout the world, they would take on a kind of otherworldly network of power. They would thrive in a hot, acidic climate no longer ideal for the abundance of life once indigenous to the planet. They would glow with mesmerizing, preternatural effervescence. They would be undying.