賀瑋玲 Weiling He

March 2013 marks the beginning of Austin’s choice of environment over convenience as an ordinance banning both paper and plastic bags begins. The ban is one of the broadest in the country, and Austin is the largest city in Texas to ban single-use bags. We propose an installation project to further pronounce Austin’s bag ban and increase environmental awareness on a larger scale, beyond Austin. We will call for volunteers to collect plastic bags and help make curtains from them, and then we will hang the curtains on tree trunks starting on the UT campus and sprawling outwards toward the city. After the installation, the bags will be collected and recycled.

The project aims to reveal an appearance that oscillates between beautiful and ugly, an elusive yet blunt image of the plastic monster that humans have created. At times, the plastic bags will aggregate into curtains that drape, swing, and billow, as fragile as blossoming flowers and as elegant as trains flowing behind elegant dresses. The translucence of the material will be rendered innocently under the sun. At other times, however, the plastic bags will scream the monstrous truth: over 1 trillion plastic bags are used every year worldwide; about 1 million plastic bags are used every minute; a single plastic bag can take up to 1,000 years to degrade; plastic bags remain toxic even after they break down; and every square mile of ocean has about 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in it. The plastic bag curtains will engulf the trees, our living space, and maybe even ourselves. The beautiful surface of the plastic bag curtains will arouse the uncanny anticipation of the grotesque.

Plastic is made from compounds synthesized from nature but may take an extremely long time to return to nature. The proposed plastic bag curtain project cannot change this stunning fact, but it presents an occasion for us to look at what we have created and may have taken for granted.

After winning the competition, Curtains, called by the University of Austin, the team was given a site on the UT campus to re-design and construct the installation. The construction is completed in October, 2013. 14,000 plastic shopping bags were used.

Competition Team: Ganesh Rao, Miaomiao Xiao, Shyam K.
Construction Engineering:: John Nichols, Keenan McCord