Plastic Poetics Challenging the epistemologies of plastic waste in the artwork of Maria Roelofsen

Maria Roelofsen is an artist based on the island of Texel in the Netherlands. She constructs sculptural works in the form of animals using materials that wash up on the strand, predominantly wood and plastic (see fig. 10.1 and fig. 10.2), and exhibits and sells these sculptures in the RAT Gallery (RAT standing for Recomposed Art Texel) in Den Burg, the main town on the island. Roelofsen’s works are whimsical, engaging, and accessible, and yet they perform a vital function in surfacing the circuitous nature of global waste and pointing to the universal human complicity in ineffective plastic disposal. Plastic, literally dragged to the surface of the ocean, points to what exists below the surface, both the unknowable tons of plastics of various shapes and sizes and states of degradation that drift around the world’s oceans, and the ethical discomfort we must feel, even unconsciously, in the recognition of our own complicity and helplessness in effecting any substantial change. Roelofsen’s decision to focus predominantly on interpretations of nonhuman animals draws a correlation between the dynamism and migratory nature of living creatures— particularly oceanic animals— and the uncontainable, malleable nature of plastic. A material conduced by the petrochemical industry’s range of outputs and in turn sourced by the bodies of creatures that died hundreds of millions of years ago, plastic appears on the scene as both our most contemporary substance— a marker of the unique capacities of modern industry— and immortal. The ontological demarcation of plastic as waste or toxic or disposable is temporary, and rewritten in Roelofsen’s art by introducing a “poetics of waste” that engages in aesthetic play to displace the obvious discourse on the environmentally destructive tendencies of plastic, and instead provoke a sense of beauty and renewed purpose in plastic in its ontological recomposition with other, natural elements. The object form of plastic itself will, in this essay, put pressure on the classic arrangement of the aesthetic encounter as it is enumerated in the Kantian tradition, even as its resurfacing as art object in turn verifies that arrangement. If oil, as Imre Szeman terms it, is the “ur-commodity” of modernity, then plastic will surface the concrete abstraction of petrocultural periodization in our analysis.