Local artist and activist Kim Thomas is the curator behind an exciting group show at Summerville’s Public Works Art Center: Recent Remnants, an exhibition which calls for climate action by presenting artworks made from collected plastic waste.
Thomas shows work in Recent Remnants alongside Carson Carroll, Vassiliki Falkehag and Shannon Hopkins. The four artists use installation, printmaking and plastic fiber art in different ways to explore the relationship between humans, single use plastics and the natural environment.
But the artworks are not only a call to action; they are also a showcase of the beauty that can be found in repurposing unconventional and otherwise wasted materials.
Sparking dialogue
The two largest pieces in the show face one another in the gallery space and deal with different aspects of the environmental dialogue. The first is one of Thomas’s large-scale plastic weavings, titled “Mass 3.” The work is the result of hours of crocheting, but instead of using yarn, Thomas uses plastic bags that she collects mostly from her art students at Cane Bay High School. The large-scale work seems to be in conversation with Falkehag’s “Plasticity 2,” on the opposite wall, which is, in contrast to Thomas’s heavy-hanging work, light and airy.
Thomas’s piece points to the interconnectedness of plastic to our daily lives and how it becomes “entangled in our environment,” she said, while Falkehag’s plastic installation shows the flimsy and futile qualities of the material.
Blue cyanotype prints of objects like bottle caps, socks, straws, plastic bags, masks and hair ties creep up the walls of the gallery in a work by Carson Caroll titled “Field Trip.” It’s made by arranging objects, in this case, collected litter, on photographically sensitized paper.
Thomas said Carolls’ work unifies two seemingly-at-odds ideas that drive Recent Remnant’s dialogue: A call to action and calling viewers in by presenting beauty.
‘Interconnectedness’
Recent Remnants is made by four artists who are also educators: Hopkins and Thomas work together at Cane Bay High School, Caroll is the director of education at Redux Contemporary Art Center and Falkehag has taught at the collegiate level. Thomas jokes that Falkehag is her “art mom” because she’s learned so much from her.
These four artists are particularly equipped to present an exhibition which drives home a lesson about stewardship for the natural environment. But the show is not didactic: It allows space for personal connection and contemplation with these themes. In her curatorial statement, Thomas explains Recent Remnants is really all about “the interconnectedness of all life forms.”
That’s where themes of family and exploration of things like birth and death come into play.
An installation by Hopkins brings large tree branches into the gallery space. The branches are wrapped with pieces of newsprint to resemble trees in the woods that are marked for removal. Hopkins actually burnt some of that foraged wood to make her own charcoal, which she uses to draw trees on the newsprint. The work is inspired by Hopkins’ personal experiences with the cycles of life and death, she said, “I’m a part of the cycle. We all are.”
And Thomas, too incorporates familial themes — she presents her “plarn” or “plastic yarn,” the primary material for her hanging works, as a sculpture on the floor of the gallery — one big “plarn” ball is attached to a smaller one that sits next to it. Thomas said the work is a sort of self portrait, of her and her child attached by the umbilical cord.
Small green bags filled with dirt and tiny trees pepper the floor of the gallery. “I knew that I wanted to have a live element,” Thomas said. She and Falkehag collaborated to bring bits of nature into the conversation with this work, which is titled after a poem by Joyce Kilmer: “I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.”
The four female artists also connect the restoration of the natural environment with uplifting of female artistic expression: There’s an ecofeminist undertone in Recent Remnants that should not be missed.
Feminist artists have historically embraced alternative materials that did not have the same male-dominated precedent that painting and sculpture carried. Thomas and Falkehag make works that deviate from fiber art techniques like crochet, typically considered “women’s work,” sometimes overlooked in the art world and often taught from mother to daughter.
Thomas said her ultimate hope is that the show will invite viewers to contemplate their relationship to the natural world. “Each artwork serves as a mirror, compelling us to confront the repercussions of our actions and to embrace a deeper sense of stewardship for our planet.”
Recent Remnants is on view at Public Works Art Center in Summerville now through March 16.
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