When making this sculpture, I was thinking of all the waste we put into the Earth that prevents or slows down the growth of natural conditions. Take this Pepsi can for example. It can be recycled, however it is easier to throw it into the nearest trash bin that you can find. The nationwide recycling rate is only 35% (yay for them!) BUT that leaves a whopping 65% of waste not being recycled (aw). What happens to the rest of these soda cans that are left to fend for themselves? Well, they end up in the landfill where they begin to decompose for 200 years. As long as these materials are around in the environment, they will slow down natural growth and be detrimental to plants, flowers, trees, etc.
This is why I decided to make flowers out of aluminum soda cans because it is ironic to me that we can make materials that last forever, but also hurt the Earth which slowly increases its chance of becoming inhabitable which is something that we’d want to stay forever. There are other materials that could have been used to give the same feeling if I were to make this sculpture with something else (newspaper, plastic bottles, cardboard), but considering we are in quarantine I used what I could! You can say that this sculpture is sustainable because it requires no maintenance or monitoring and can last for hundreds of years.
I do agree that if you know that something has a finite amount of time, it does affect the experience you want to get out of it. When talking about human lives, anyone would want the best life that they can get because life is short. There’s no way we could turn back time and relive a moment again. When talking about environmental factors (clean water, air, land) these should definitely be elements that sustain forever. Without these factors we would be able to have a sustainable human life, so it goes hand in hand with each other.
One person alone would not be able to make a dent in a global program for climate change. It is possible for this person to send a message to a decent amount of people, but without help from others to monitor and maintain the work that would be put in, it would not be sustainable. As bad as this sounds, I feel that people only decide to take action when it begins to affect them directly. So we’d just have to wait and see what happens in the future.
Cynthia's Blog 