Kaneohe artist Shannon McCarthy has formal training in figurative art, but her focus nowadays is on what she calls microplastic mosaics.
She makes art out of the small pieces of degenerated plastic that wash ashore on Oahu’s beaches.
For McCarthy, 30, the mosaics serve an urgent educational purpose.
"It really comes down to bringing awareness to how much plastic we use every day and how unnecessary all that is," she said. "It doesn’t go away."
The artist’s signature piece to date is a five-panel scene of two Hawaiian monk seals and a pup on Oahu’s North Shore that has been displayed at Honolulu Hale and at Jack Johnson’s Waikiki Shell concerts in August.
According to McCarthy, the piece was a true collaborative effort. She enlisted help from hundreds of elementary school students and Girl Scouts to help glue on the pieces of plastic marine debris. She built the panels and framed them with wood from strawberry guava, considered an invasive species in Hawaii.
"Art does something to the human spirit," she said. "To see Oahu communities take part in their beloved beaches, help the ocean, then turn it into art — it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen."
McCarthy is now working on a 3-by-4-foot mosaic of a sunset above a wave, inspired by a recent surfing session.
A graduate of Academy of Art University in San Francisco, she first stumbled upon plastic marine debris while jogging on the beach in Kailua after moving here from the Bay Area three years ago.
"I noticed right away," she said. "It was just so overwhelming, the amount of microplastics."
She started picking it up and later joined the nonprofit group Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii, which hosts regular beach cleanups. McCarthy is one of several artists who work with the group.
The monk seal mosaic continues to be displayed at various community events.
McCarthy has since completed about a dozen mosaics of varying sizes, which she hopes to assemble into an exhibition to inspire change.
She gathers material from beach cleanups and also goes out on her own to collect. The plastic pieces come in a broad spectrum of colors and textures, which she sorts into glass jars.
Typically, green and blue debris are more common, while red and purple are more difficult to find. But there is no lack of material.
Most of the pieces have inspired ocean scenes, but one is of a tree with upward-reaching branches. A female figure representing a "personal relationship to nature" is featured in many of them.
For larger mosaics, McCarthy sketches an outline, then affixes the pieces using regular school glue. She generally uses the plastic bits as she found them but once in a while might break a piece to fit.
Gluing can take hours, but McCarthy puts on some music and finds it to be a meditative process.
She still loves acrylic and bronze as a medium, but believes making a statement with plastic, the medium of this age, is most relevant right now.
"You have the Bronze Age, the Golden Age, you have all these different ages of civilizations from around the world, including the Internet Age," she said. "We really are in the plastic age."
On the Net:
» shannonemccarthyart.blogspot.com
