Blue McRight

GATHER

My mind is in the gutter; constantly looking for plastic straws and lids in the street and on the beach. In parking lots and along roadways, I gather fallen urban fruit from the filthy orchard of our consumer culture. 

This daily practice is the foundational action from which I have created Gather. The works in the exhibition engage literally and metaphorically with notions of picking up, collecting, and coming together in the context of plastic pollution and climate change.

Synthesizing many years of witnessing the ocean wilderness as a scuba diver, the visual richness of the underwater world and its organic processes of life and death, gender fluidity, reproduction, and communication inspire me. I utilize salvaged fishing nets, fish and crab traps, bait baskets and other former instruments of death; though porous, they carry the weight of phantom multitudes.

Their open mesh recalls the clear bodies of many marine species whose interiors are visible. Each net has a quirky asymmetry, brought about by prior vigorous use, that I respond to. They enable my formal and narrative exploration of transparency, weight, scale, texture, and color. I stretch and cover; cutting, knotting and tying, gathering and binding, I make each piece in cycles of repetition and improvisation. 

While diving, I am always fascinated by wildly encrusted mooring blocks, ropes, and a huge array of other surfaces whose takeover by intricate colonies of sea life is underway. These colonial creatures transform whatever object they encrust into something entirely new: a pseudomorph, or “false form”. A ghost of the original.

Gather presents encrustation pseudomorphs, transparent bodies, and patterns of communication and perception in an installation of sculptures suspended from the ceiling, while a large group of intimately scaled pieces - Anemones - grows on one wall.

I insist that plastic trash such as salvaged nets, rope, straws, hairbands, etc. can be  beautiful as artwork material. Gather asks us to collectively confront the possibilities of what we thoughtlessly discard, giving agency to the rejected as it assumes space in the realm of cultural dialogue, alluding to what is overlooked and wasted.