Stranded

In ‘Stranded’, Vanessa Billy draws comparisons between the ebbs and flows of global finance and of non-biodegradable synthetic waste. When byproducts are freed from the service of Capitalism they are forgotten, left to freely drift, until eventually they coagulate and toxify elsewhere. It is the stuff in the imagined elsewhere that piques Billy’s interests and where she finds her catalysts.

To imagine The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is to imagine a vast, dense floating conglomeration of waste, a plastic iceberg, with potential for eventual utopian colonisation. Inhabited by future generations it would become an exemplary, autonomous seasteading principality. A buoyant, inorganic landmass of the previous generations’ rubbish. Though the flipside dystopian imagining would more likely prevail; the floating nation would surely be swiftly co-opted as a free economic zone, a tax haven, or an offshore bank.

In reality, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is no solid mass, rather an area of ocean that has high concentrations of plastics, chemical sludge and debris that have been caught between the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. Where ocean currents collide and form gigantic whirlpools, waste becomes trapped, attracting more and more waste, becoming more and more toxic, and eventually moving on up the food chain.

The presence of heaps and stacks of material within Billy’s exhibition alludes to contemporary excesses: one metric ton of PET, 25 aluminium ladders and floating car engines overshadow Billy’s ‘honey’ coin towers. There is a disproportionate relationship: whilst the money remains fluid, these excess materials, the fallout of profit and production, are bound to their final form.