New exhibition highlights plastic as 'valuable' material

The University of Hertfordshire is hosting a new plastic exhibition, Plastic Matter, which includes a canopy of recycled bottles and a huge box of items found in the River Thames.

Running at the Hatfield campus until April, the exhibition, displays installations, film and photography from eight artists, including the canopy of 1,600 plastic bottles filled with coloured water and a time lapse video of 9,273 plastic spoons and 3,091 rubber bands as they collapse and decay.

The BBC reported, the curators hope the display will "provoke conversations and action" and one artist, Maria Arceo, said she wanted "to inspire people to change the way they look at plastic".

Her work, Neocide, features material collected from more than 40 beaches along the Thames displayed in layers, looking at how quickly we use and dispose of plastic pollution.

She said that after being told 2,000-year-old leather shoes had been found in rivers she discovered plastic only breaks down when exposed to light or heat, so in deep water they will never degrade and then become part of future rock formations.

Arceo tells the BBC: "In Neocide, I separated the plastic into colours to highlight the idea of [rock] strata and also I wanted to make it attractive, precious and to change people's idea of plastic as a cheap and disposable material," she said.

"By creating artworks... you can see it as a resource rather than just something you can dispose of."