My intention in this series was to draw attention to the serious problem of earth pollution, but I had a lot of fun creating the sculptures and being in this particular visual fantasy of what the future holds.
The series began when I was thinking about how there is a lot of talk about the oceans being polluted by plastics, but you don’t hear as much about the destruction of our forests via pollution. Maybe we don’t see mountains of plastic, but they are there. How much of a landfill is made up of non-degradable manmade materials? We are what we consume, and the same is true for forests. What will our forests look like if we continue to pollute the earth at this rate? This series is my meditation on that question.
The plastics I have used in these pieces come from my own family’s consumption. In our town we can only recycle plastics #1 & #2. So all the rest go into our regular garbage. I retrieved some of those pieces to use in these forests. These sculptures also incorporate photographs I took of various types of tree trunks. In paying attention to them I have been stunned by their beauty. The richness of the natural world determines to express itself under the weight of our consumption debris.
See the full show and more of Joy Kreve's work here.
The Distressed Forest will be on view at the 2019 Hopewell Tour Des Arts coming up on November 9th & 10.
JOY KREVES is a mixed media artist whose works explore the connections between language, psychology and landscape.
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