The constant in my work is collecting and arranging. For the last three years I have been picking up small plastic shards from the beach. I am allured by their apparent fragility yet struck by their unnatural permanence.

The traditional definition of a shard is piece of pottery found on archeological sites. They can be pieced together to reveal clues of when and who lived on that site. A more general definition refers to a piece or fragment of a brittle substance: a small piece or part. The shards I recover are fragments of lost and discarded objects made of synthetic materials. They have often traveled great distances, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces. Finding them does not give me clues of what lays beneath me, but rather raises questions. Where did it come from? What is it part of? How long has the journey been? What happened on the way?

My feelings are mixed. I enjoy sitting the sand, listening to the ocean and the meditative process of looking for these treasures. I find them beautiful gems having been polished and eroded by long travels. Yet, I am aware of how damaging plastic is on ocean ecology and how theses pieces are only a small sampling of what floats through our oceans camouflaged as plankton, sea weed or fish. They are reminders of the discrepancy between human agency and environmental forces.