The Earth’s environmental issues have been given the back seat in the face of the current coronavirus pandemic and after years of discouraging single-use items, they’ve made a roaring, necessitous comeback in the form of masks, face shields and gloves.
But UK designer Alice Potts is proving that the two issues can work together, creating 'Dance Biodegradable Personal Protective Equipment (DBPPE) Post Covid Facemasks', a series of 20 “fully degradable” face shields out of sustainable bioplastics as part of the blockbuster NGV Triennial exhibition.
While the face shields really capture the 2020 zeitgeist, they aren’t what Potts originally planned to present for the blockbuster exhibition. Potts was approached to take part in the Triennial prior to lockdown, and the idea was that she’d present one of her sweat crystallisation works – where she turns literal sweat into crystals and crystalline objects. “Then Covid happened and I think that changed everyone’s work and everyone’s practice,” says Potts. “I had a massive fear that if I used people’s sweat and crystallised it, would Covid still be able to survive as a crystal?”
With that in mind, Potts turned her attention to the bioplastics elements of her practice – material that looks and feels like plastic but is made out of organic matter like algae and seaweed (and in Potts’s case, made from discarded food waste). “I made it a challenge for myself, to develop materials with all the restrictions that were going on. So the [UK's] 2km radius, using stuff that was local and in my hour walk for the day. It was quite an exciting challenge to almost be like ‘how would the world survive if we didn’t import and export?’”
Just as the idea to move from sweat crystallisation works to bioplastics was necessary due to the pandemic, so too was the idea to turn that bioplastic into PPE. “My brother is a paramedic for the NHS,” says Potts. “There was a massive lack of PPE for frontline people.” And at the same time, she says there was optimism at the start of lockdowns that with reduced travel and human movement within the environment, that “sustainability has an opportunity”.
“And then plastic became an essential,” she laughs. “And I think that everything that had happened in the first two months [of the lockdowns] – buying food locally, trying to recycle, trying to make our own things – really was counteracted.”
Potts used the situation, and her experience in both art and science, to look into how she could start making “100 per cent biodegradable face shields”, in contrast to traditional plastics which can take up to 1,000 years to break down. “Plastic itself is an amazing material,” says Potts. “But actually, plastic is only really needed for things that are critical. So things like doctors, nurses, astronauts, firemen... us as everyday consumers don’t need the longevity of a plastic.”
The masks are fully degradable and made from food waste and coloured with flowers, all of which Potts sourced locally and in collaboration with those in the community. This included florists, who had grown an abundance of flowers for events that were now never going to happen. “There was one farmer that we worked with and she’d grown flowers that take two years to grow. They bloomed this year and they were all just going to go to waste,” says Potts. “So it was trying to find a community of people who’d been affected by this and bring them together to make something when everything seems so negative.”
The 20 biodegradable face shields are tinted using pigments created from plant and food waste over a three month period, boiling and dehydrating plants to extract the pigments (“I think my housemates went a bit crazy as I was hanging plants all in our living room”). When presented at the NGV, the shields will be displayed to showcase their seasonality, highlighting which plants were in season throughout their creation. And while the works are pleasing to look at – the coloured, semi-transparent works feel alien and organic all at once – Potts’s end game is to create something functional. “That’s the methodical thinker in me, [that] this can be mass-produced and possibly used as an everyday product,” she says.
This clear intersection in Potts’s practice between art and science is something that’s reflected in her own background. Originally she was studying to be an accountant when she decided to pull a complete 180 and study fashion. “I was studying chemistry, psychology and advanced maths,” she says. “I didn't know who Alexander McQueen was [and] I’d never seen calico in my life.”
She attributes the volte-face to her interest in the mechanics of the world, and how materials can be used as a second skin that can actually aid the body, not just alter its appearance. “I was always interested in how you change a weave or how you change construction to help ligaments or muscles or prevent injury through construction,” she says. Her passion for sustainability is something that has “always just been my mythology” she says, and notes that art is in a position to further environmentally conscious ideas, materials and practices. “There's a growing movement on biomaterials, but because it’s such a new material, people can’t understand it until they've seen it,” she says. “Even with my bioplastics there are thousands of things you can do with it, [whether that’s] using it as sequins in fashion or as protective gear or making chairs.”
“Art itself is an opportunity to showcase how sustainability can be applied into the system.”
You can see Alice Potts's work 'Dance Biodegradable Personal Protective Equipment (DBPPE) Post Covid Facemasks' as part of the NGV Triennial running Dec 19 to Apr 18.