Sandra Hansen, MFA  

ARTNOMAD 

 

Sandra Hansen created an undersea world with pure, sustainable handmade paper and repurposed  plastic bags. Paper and plastics are the natural and the unnatural, the life giver and the life destroyer, the dichotomy of life and death. Often the two are mixed like microscopic plastic in our drinking water. Hansen’s art is about life or death and our love of plastic.

As the environmental crisis grows larger so does Hansen’s art. Her new installation is an undersea universe with paper sea creatures wearing ropes and fishing nets like scarves and capes casually draped around their shoulders. Her largest piece is a life-sized humpback paper whale that hangs from the ceiling. Fishing nets made from plastic bags cascade from the ceiling and walls. A paper dolphin and a paper sea turtle glide through the underwater world. Translucent plastic bags are repurposed into jelly fish.

The world resonates with plastics and can no longer imagine life without them. Every sea, lake and water mass has a gyre of plastics, according to Marcus Eriksen, co-founder of 5 Gyres. “The gyres we study account for about 25 percent of the planet’s surface, and they draw pollution from all over the world... It would be a waste of time and money to try to clean up all the plastic in the gyres, identifying and reducing that pollution at its sources upstream is the only way to reduce it.” Plastics are in the drinking water, placentas, and babies. We are almost unable to buy clothes and vegetables without plastics. The health care system uses plastics for medicines, IV tubing, syringes, sterilized packaging, and many other things. Houses are encased in plastic vinyl siding. Our transportation is full of plastic in the seating, bumpers, and dashboards. This is the exquisite pollution that we love.

A Day at the Beach: Koi

This crispy, thin, pigmented paper is handmade made from Japanese gampi pulp and found objects.  Most of the objects were found on beaches in the US, Britain, and Wales. 

82 x 39"