Sophie Buckley Contemporary Crafts

Artist Statement

My work focuses on the workings of the natural world; how things grow, and the way an area is colonised.

Looking for a local, environmentally sound material to create colonies from led me to plastic found on the beach. Plastic has featured heavily in the media recently due to the untold long-term damage it could be causing to our marine ecosystem. I gathered plastic shards, fishing net and rope from beaches across Cornwall, and used it to create shell-like forms which ‘grow’ out of this plastic debris.

The spiralling shell forms come from a crochet pattern I created based on the Fibonacci sequence – Nature’s ‘blueprint’ for shells and other spiralling forms such as pine cones. Crochet was ideally suited to this kind of growth, because of its mathematical properties and the way a piece is built up, layer on layer.

In the act of gathering this plastic debris and reworking it to represent creatures of the eco-system it damages, I hope to appeal to people’s imagination to help raise awareness of the problems of plastic to our global marine environment.



	Artist Statement My work focuses on the workings of the natural world; how things grow, and the way an area is colonised. Looking for a local, environmentally sound material to create colonies from led me to plastic found on the beach. Plastic has featured heavily in the media recently due to the untold long-term damage it could be causing to our marine ecosystem. I gathered plastic shards, fishing net and rope from beaches across Cornwall, and used it to create shell-like forms which ‘grow’ out of this plastic debris. The spiralling shell forms come from a crochet pattern I created based on the Fibonacci sequence – Nature’s ‘blueprint’ for shells and other spiralling forms such as pine cones. Crochet was ideally suited to this kind of growth, because of its mathematical properties and the way a piece is built up, layer on layer. In the act of gathering this plastic debris and reworking it to represent creatures of the eco-system it damages, I hope to appeal to people’s imagination to help raise awareness of the problems of plastic to our global marine environment.