Paola Catizone

It took months of meticulous hand crafting to upcycle the hundreds of collected plastic bottles used in the sculptural aspect of the exhibition. The patient, craft-like repetitive movements used through this process had meditative, performative qualities.  The performance was a ritual  offering to the polluted waters of our lakes, seas and waterways.  The geometrical beauty of diatoms, the smallest water based life forms inspired the sculptural forms. A large, blue, hanging sculpture, made of cut and heated plastic bottles, became the “Waterfall”.

Plastic watery beings populated the exhibition space, with the transparency and clarity of plastic reflecting materially on the appearance of water. A reflective wall, made of fishing tackle, was woven, by repeatedly climbing and kneeling down from ceiling to floor, in a ritualistic, performative set of actions.

A long video: ‘Light, Plastic Water,’ was filmed by the artist in three locations, all of which she considered home. The film features the  heavily polluted stream running through the Landstown Valley, near the artist home in South Dublin, streams near Ashford, Co Wicklow, where she spent time caretaking an abandoned house, and the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, as they lapped the shores of Las canteras beach, in her mother’s native Las Palmas, in Gran Canaria.

As an embodiment facilitator, Catizone has an awareness of the prominence of the element of water in the human body, our most enduring and essential home.

Robin Sherry Wood composed the soundtrack for Light, Plastic Water, creating two sound pieces for two different versions of the video.

The artist's daughters, Francesca and Amy, and even her little dog, Oscar, appear in Sweet Spontaneous, a home video that takes its name from the title of a poem by EECummins. The two  women’s readings see an overlapping of Sweet Spontaneous with an excerpt from a book by environmental scientist David Attemborough, building up to a chaotic crescendo. They wear head pieces made of up-cycled plastic.

Light, Plastic, Water is a meditation on plastic pollution of our waters and our bodies. It hopes to move viewers to take action on plastic production and waste.