November 12 - Plastic Bag Birds = Art???

nPosted on November 12, 2019

Key points

nHave you ever seen scads and scads of starlings flying in the sky, swooping and turning as if the huge flock shares one brain?

nThousands of starlings gathered together are called a murmuration. And there’s this thing that happens as the murmuration fly toward their nests as the day draws to a close, or if a hawk approaches the edge of the flock.

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It’s as if the starlings are artists, performing mesmerizing dances for us. Be sure to check out the video at the link above, and maybe this video as well…

nWell, artist Alaine Delorme used plastic bags to represent birds and produced murmuration art that explores our feelings about natural environments and human-made pollution:

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Today is the anniversary of these glorious photos being shown to the public, in 2013, after years of work to create them.

This series of photographs is called Ephemeral Plastic Sculptures. It’s a curious name, because “ephemeral” means lasting just a short amount of time…and plastic, as we all know, lasts a very loooooong time.

nPlastic in landfills doesn’t break down at all rapidly (some kinds take a thousand years to decompose!), and unfortunately, plastic in the rough-and-tumble ocean does breaks down – but not into atoms that can be safely used by living creatures. Instead, plastic in the ocean breaks down into teeny pieces of…plastic! These microplastics are ingested by sea life, and they can be toxic and probably cause problems we don’t even know about yet.

So plastic isn’t ephemeral, but Delorme’s “sculptures” are, right?

nWell, except…they aren’t really sculptures!

nDelorme takes photographs of individual plastic bags and then uses those photos to digitally create these amazing murmuration pictures. Check out his methods in this video.