The tragic beauty of a beach full of plastic

Meet Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang. For more than ten years, they’ve been collecting plastic debris from a 1 km stretch of beach in Northern California, and creating art with it. They admit there is much beauty in the trash they find, but their message is one of concern about the Pacific garbage patch.

One Plastic Beach from High Beam Media on Vimeo.

From their site:

We have rambled this one remote beach hundreds of times to gather plastic debris washing out of the Pacific Ocean. By carefully collecting and “curating” the bits of plastic, we fashion it into works of art— art that matter-of-factly shows, with minimal artifice, the material as it is. The viewer is often surprised that this colorful stuff is the thermoplastic junk of our throwaway culture. As we have deepened our practice we’ve found, like archeologists, that each bit of what we find opens into a pinpoint look at the whole of human culture. Each bit has a story to tell.

And these artists are great storytellers.