We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Elizabeth McAlpin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Elizabeth, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
The most meaningful project I have worked on thus far is my single use plastic bottle project. I started this project in 2020 and continue it to this day. Living in a large city you see a lot of single use plastic waste everywhere. So much so that it has become an obsession of mine. I first started crushing and twisting them as objects to draw and turn into etchings or lithographs. Then I started to collect them in order to repurpose them into my artwork as paper mache objects. Some repurposed bottles are stuffed with single use plastic while others are crushed and twisted. They are layered with discarded paper and gesso to form a surface to apply hand printed papers or painted imagery. Some paper-mache plastic bottles are enhanced with technology while others blend imperceptibly into their backgrounds. My fixation extends to works on paper and ceramics as I contemplate the object represented with other materials. The single-use plastic bottle transforms into a toxic object of beauty to be contemplated rather than discarded with indifference. Currently, I am constructing a full chess set from these salvaged single-use vessels.
The work aims to awaken us to see beyond our field of vision to how the linear economic system destroys a cyclical natural one, how the role of the individual and the collective behave in this system, and the dangerous paradox presented in the plastic state of mind. Like the twisted and broken Roman statues preserved in museums tell of a past empire, plastic will be preserved in the land, water, and air to tell of yet another empire.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
While I started my artistic journey as a teenager it really came out of the closet when I moved to New Mexico at the age of twenty-one. There, I studied classical painting and drawing for several years with two mentors from the Art Students League who also moved there from New York City. They introduced me to their mentor in France and with whom I also studied for several years before moving back to NYC to develop my own artistic path. These formative years helped me to build strong drawing and painting skills that I still use today as a tool in the toolbox. When I moved back to NYC in my late twenties I started to build my own artistic vision. Working for a commercial mural company helped me to paint large and more expressively. Years later, I started learning printmaking techniques from various printmaking studios around the city.
Today I call myself an interdisciplinary artist working mainly in printmaking but also in ceramics, three-dimensional paper & plastics sculpture, works on paper and canvas. I use various mediums including intaglio, drawing, painting, stencils, collagraphs, metal leaf, thread and found objects. I work with different styles concurrently including representational and abstract forms to cultivate a visual narrative that expresses my values and internal dialogues. My work often addresses natural forms and environmental issues aimed to raise awareness to the fragility of life impacted by pollution. I am very versatile with my mediums and processes. When working on a body of work that is meaningful to me I engage in research and new ways to build the work to fit the vision. The best part about being an artist is the process of building upon past work and experimenting with new materials or means to express with them. Each piece of work has the potential to be a seed for new and future work.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Most bodies of work or individual pieces are driven by exploring and abstracting a curiosity, thought, feeling, or lived experience. The single use plastic topic I noted earlier is part of a body of work titled “Plastic Fossils” driven by its very problem. It is an ongoing body of work aimed to communicate the “out of sight, out of mind” mentality around single-use plastic in a linear economy, from cradle to grave; made from fossil fuel and discarded to plastic shards and artifacts. As a society, we are pushed to produce, consume, and discard to fuel an economy, provide jobs, and advance lifestyles. As someone who finds the natural world filled with incredible intelligence and at the same time admires human ingenuity to construct complex systems to support large human populations, I find the two systems are often at odds due to basic differences in principles. My work aims to capture these paradoxical differences. In particular, I am obsessed with the single-use plastic bottles discarded everywhere polluting water, soil, and air. The bottle is symbolic, even iconic, for a modern human system overcoming the ancient natural one.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is the process itself. Engaging in a creative activity allows one to fall into a flow state where one is fully immersed in a play between conscious thought and subconscious feeling. I spend a lot of time developing and preparing materials for a concept but once I move from preparation to implementation the subconscious takes over and alters the plan. The self that wants to drive a direction must let go of the controls to allow for the work to take its own direction. There is also a past, present, and future to the process as some work may build upon other work, take on new directions, or remain dormant only to reawaken years later. When I get stuck, run out of ideas, or cannot move forward I just keep working the process trying different approaches until something breaks through. This means I may create work that is not my best work but without it I cannot create my best work. In this way the process can be frustrating at times but with faith in the process to keep doing the work I know there will be work that I really love.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://eternalnarrative.com
- Instagram: @_eternal_narrative_