In PlasticTide French-born artist Carolyn Cardinet has created a collection of mixed media assemblages utilising the familiar but repurposed forms of found single-use plastic packaging collected from around her Melbourne studio. The cumulative effect is like being swept out to sea on a raft of discarded plastic bottles.
When: Until 17 November 2018
Where: Yering Station, Cellar Door Main Gallery
Cardinet’s sculptural reflections carry viewers into maritime and subaquatic regions from which relationships between humanity, the natural environment, consumerism and the pervasive use and disuse of plastic can be considered anew.
Following on from her solo exhibition Microbeplastica in Sydney in 2017, PlasticTide explores a colour spectrum incorporating the sterile white of bleach bottles, the cloudy white of milk cartons, the synthetic white of enamel paint and the comforting matt white of takeaway coffee cup lids. Within this storm of artificial white familiar mass-produced forms swirl in a de-contextualized maelstrom often appearing to have morphed into proto-organic forms.
Allusions to waterways, seas and oceans permeate the exhibition, drawing the mind back time and again to the global problem of plastic waste, a theme brought home through Cardinet’s choice of medium and also through the luminous, suspended, patch-work surface of Shipping + tentacles, which depicts Victoria’s river systems winding across land toward the Victorian coast.
Now a resident in Melbourne, Carolyn Cardinet is an experimental artist with a Post Graduate Masters of Fine Art from RMIT University Melbourne and a Bachelor of Fine Art from VCA, Melbourne University. She has undertaken residencies in Washington in the United States and at the Australian Tapestry Workshop in Melbourne. She is the recipient of the inaugural Environmental Artist Residency in NSW and has been selected for the Biennale of Australian Art 2018.