HAWI — The current art exhibit at The Kohala Village HUB, titled “Debris or not debris,” was created by Kohala community members from trash collected for a study by the University of Hawaii at Hilo marine biology student Kanoe Phillips between June 29 and Aug. 10, 2016.
For the previous 10 years, Kohala has put on trash bash events and this year’s, the 11th, is an art show inspired by Phillips’ project.
“When I heard that he was doing this project I had a vision of doing an art show with all that debris collected from Pololu,” project leader Karen Rosen said.
Every three to four days during the collection period, Phillips gathered all debris larger than 2 centimeters at Pololu in North Kohala, washed it, weighed and analyzed it. There were a surprising amount of bottle caps from a company whose products are sold in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Another large grouping of bottle caps came from products produced in China.
Other surprises included small balls of tar or crude oil; a Styrofoam cube containing a Lockheed Martin circuit board; and a cup from the USS Cushing DD-985 destroyer, sunk during a Rimpac exercise in 2008.
The first step was to sort the debris.
“When he was done analyzing it we put it all in my garage and then Rebecca Parkes and I started sorting by color, texture, shape and material types so we would know what our palate was going to be,” Rosen said.
The project turned out to be creatively challenging.
“In the beginning, I found it very uninspiring. It’s a lot of little pieces of plastic and a lot of bottle caps. It wasn’t exciting debris: matted rope and torn up slippers. But the more I worked with it the more I began to understand how to create with it,” Rosen said.
After a year, “…we had only two pieces almost finished and I realized that just Rebecca and I couldn’t do it, so I started inviting other people to come play and glue with us. There were about eight of us and we’d get together twice a week in my garage and glue plastic. A lot of the joy in doing this was getting together and creating and being inspired by each other,” she said.
The results are stunning and represent the ways in which art and science merge to increase awareness.
“Our mission with this project is always to see how we can transform the understanding of trash to upcycle it and be more creative, and to inspire others to think outside the box,” Rosen explained.
The pieces in the exhibit blend aesthetics with a playful wake-up call about environmental threats. “Daily Dose” by Rosen is a white hedge of pill bottles. All in white, “Prayer for Ascension” by Rosen and Nancy Clement suggests a plea for light and upward movement.
“The backing is a white plastic piece that was part of the debris. I’d been seeing these crosses when we sorted and the glow sticks,” Clement said.
The compositions, such as “Arnette at Pololu” by Rosen, often started off with just a single item from which the rest of the piece grew.
“I started looking at pieces and thought, oh, this looks like a kneecap and so I started thinking of this woman’s form. Then I knew I wanted the cliffs at Pololu, but I didn’t know what I wanted for the sky and then I saw a rainbow,” Rosen said.
“I found a way to keep layering and layering and to build up texture with it. I was able to find these clumps of black plastic — gnarly looking — and it looks like a rocky beach. That’s one of the best parts of this piece, the way it mimics black rock,” she added.
The study and the art exhibit have helped raise awareness and call attention to the need to kokua the ocean.
“There’s so much debris in the ocean right now. It’s a small, small scratch of the surface,” Rosen concluded.
The free exhibit will be on display at The Kohala Village HUB through mid-May.
Info: Call 889-0404.