Plag Jewellery

I began my project focused on using plastic bags as my medium because as a material, at its core when first developed, was a material that spearheaded the evolution of commercialism and design. Plastic as an overall material has played a huge part in the industry and market, playing a positive part in a musical that is our lives from its first development. However, in recent years, it has become clear that Plastic is a double edged sword.

For a material that is so diverse in its uses, that made our every day lives easier, as time moved forward, we gradually began to change the meaning of the words we associate to the material, from being a positive alternative material, words like, cheap and disposable, changed to being negative as we began to see the impact this material truly has, and how it has made its mark in more than just the industrial and commercial arena.

The environment is suffering, and whilst many strides have been made to replace current plastic with 'biodegradable' and bio plastics, we still have to deal with the consequences of our casual use, and dispose outlook we take with plastics in general, from disposable cutlery to packaging and bags.  

With this in mind I made the decision to focus on elevating plastics value and promote environmental awareness as part of my project. With that, I decided to focus on using plastic bags as the material to focus on due to it being the one material, that we all come across in our daily lives, whether it be us using them from the supermarket, to coming across one floating around as litter during our daily commute, we interact whether indirectly or directly on a daily basis. Throughout this project, I will be using different craft techniques to manipulate this material into becoming a solid product that will represent the inherent value of plastic, and not the unilaterally perceived worthless material it seems to be currently seen as.