Week01
Recent Projects¶
 |
 |
 |
 |
Photo Credit: Alex Sargent Capps
Title: Are We Disposable?
Artist: Alexandra Sargent Capps
Thanks: 1) Kymbria Thomas and Anupam Kumar for their help with lighting this piece 2) Vanderbilt University's Curb Center for Art and Public Policy, for supporting this project through their Creative Inquiry Grant.
Description: The goal of Are We Disposable? is to highlight the melding of the plastic trash polluting our oceans and marine life with human form. Is existing in a plastic-filled world leading us to live a disposable reality? This half-scale model is perhaps a first step to creating a larger work.
Materials: mixed media included assorted plastic single-use trash, discarded items from the Goodwill bins including a tulle skirt, an old paper towel roll holder, bendable wire, acrylic paint, rubber balls, organza ribbon, LED strip lights .
Process for Making Are We Disposable?¶
Playing with Trash¶
 |
 |
 |
Project Drawings¶
Inspirational Art References and Designers Using Trash to Create Public Art with a Message¶
Interesting Images¶
These images are made utilizing upcycled plastic.
 |
 |
 |
William Armor¶
French plastic artist
Text below is from this website
https://www.caringgallery.com/artists/91-william-amor/overview/
"Visual artist, Enobler of abandoned materials William Amor, finds the origin of his artistic approach in a desire to put art at the service of poetry, life and ecology. With his singular, sensitive and meaningful works, the artist proposes another look at everything that surrounds us and that we have forgotten or denigrated the presence, existence and origin. The philosophy of the artist and his works calls for a break with value judgments. William Amor uses our polluting waste, those of our daily life and the abandoned materials to imagine artistic works, inspired by nature and the living, baptized Les Créations Messagères. Driven by a taste for commitment and aestheticism, he metamorphoses plastic pollution and creates his own artistic signature by developing and imagining his own techniques, some of which are borrowed from the art world... These daily wastes become exceptional pieces, carrying meaning and values. The artist distills a touch of beauty and poetry while raising awareness of overconsumption and pollution. William Amor's leitmotiv is to create meaning and to give light to essential values that can be neglected in our society today. In the 2000's, from a metamorphosis of plastic materials abandoned in nature, were born the Creations Messagères. "Plastic waste is a terrible symbol of our society's excesses and catastrophic effects on all living things. It is a heresy to consider an indestructible material and from non-renewable resources as a material for single use: a value judgment that has heavy consequences." William Amor's creations are presented as poetic messengers, provoking emotions and willing to change the way we look at things. A plastic waste can become the most beautiful and sensual thing on earth: a beautiful, fragile and graceful flower."
Addtional Websites with Amor's incredible designs/creations!
1) https://www.creationsmessageres.com/en/
2) https://www.valeriehenry.com/william-amor/
Bonnie Monteleone¶
Bonnie is a scientist and artist on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She uses art to intersect ideas around ocean plastic. Her artwork below utilizes The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a woodblock print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai (1760–1849), created in late 1831 during the Edo period of Japanese history. Bonnie has travelled to all five ocean gyres in order to investigate the enormous amount of plastic waste that is infesting all of earth's five oceans: the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Southern (or Antarctic).
Using images that people know and already love helps to make art identifable and create public buy-in. Great art and design is copied by others because all design is an interpretation of what has come before, but interpretations and visual outcomes change because of new and innovative tools and techniques. Bonnie's use of Japanese artist Hokusai, whose famous wave woodcut can be interpreted as symbolizing nature's power, impending threats from the outside world, or the Japanese people's ability to navigate an uncertain future, presents the current environmental situation which, layered with okusai's image, provides a powerful visual representation of how our world is changing due to the use of non-sustianable practices and materials. Comparing current environmental threats to the threat of the outside world felt in Japan in the early 19th century gives Bonnie's work powerful relevance and speaks to the cyclical, constant nature of the struggles of the human race.
 |
 |
 |
Connected Videos: Making Plastic Trash Art Projects¶
From YouTube
Adrienne Outlaw¶
I am very interested in Adrienne's devotion to her work in using plastic trash to make art, and community engagement as a vital part of her process.
The quote below is taken from Adrienne's website https://www.adrienneoutlaw.com/
"As a socially engaged artist, I transform plastic waste into artworks that prompt dialogue around environmental justice, sustainability, and collective empowerment. Rooted in fiber arts, my practice draws on the traditions of handwork and communal making—what I liken to a contemporary quilting bee—uniting people and discarded materials to build something new and meaningful together."
In September 2025, I went to an art festival in Nashville to meet Adrienne and see her piece, created by community members attaching plastic bottle caps to mesh for her dome structure. The piece looked wonderful outside and had solar lights that lit up at night/ making the surface texture look like stained-glass. Plastic zip ties attached the bottle caps. It would be great to find a sustainable product instead of the zip-ties that attach everything together.
Adrienne is connected to Vanderbilt University, having gotten a master's degree through the Master of Liberal Arts and Science program I have taught in.
 |
 |
 |
Developing this Website¶
I struggled to get my images sized small enough for the Gitlab 100KB requirement. I tried: putting them through tinyPNG and a variety of online image compression sites; making collages on Canva to make my documentation easier to make my images more streamline; and scaling them down. Still, I could not get them compressed enough. Finally, I found that when the images are in the Download file on my computer, I can compress them very easily both in pixilation and size. Figuring out this method has been extrememly helpful and taken away a lot of my struggles with GitLab.
 |
||
 |
 |
My Understanding of the GitHub Platform¶
I have learned a lot, although still have some frustrations,w ith the GitHub platform. Some learning outcomes:
1) Coding an image: first step is to shrink the size of the image through my computer's downloads, both by lowering the image quality and sometimes the pixilation 2) Upload the image into GitHub through the Image Upload function 3) Code the images into my website in various ways depending on whether creating a single or groups of images. The code for single images is ! and for groups of three images ||||, |---|---|---|, then a space | |, adding a bracket for each addtional grouped image.
To code a video, I go onto Youtube, press on the video, press "Copy embed code", then copy into my website documentation.
To code a link, I wrap the link text in brackets,and then wrap the URL in parentheses ( )