PLASTIC HERBARIUMS

This series returns to one of my recurring preoccupations: plastic waste — its persistence, its ubiquity, and its strange potential for beauty. The work began elsewhere. Over ten to fifteen years, I collected discarded plastic toys with the intention of transforming them into medieval religious figures — saints, holy icons, objects of devotion. But the outcome was elusive. The forms looked wrong, disconnected from any inner logic. So I broke them. That act of breaking turned out to be the real beginning. From breakage came shredding, and from shredding, the heat press, where plastic melts and moves according to its own nature, finding an organic flow I hadn't directed. What emerged from that process, unexpectedly, were flowers. Not the altar I had imagined building, but the offering placed before it.

These bouquets are wall-mounted or designed to hang in windows where light passes through them. They hold the tension between the natural and the manufactured, made entirely from what we have discarded, yet carrying the language of gift-giving, of beauty, of something worth preserving. The juxtaposition is the conversation: that waste can become this. That what we throw away still has somewhere to go.