PRIVATE ISLAND

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Emily Sullivan Smith's work for Really Big Prints is titled, Private Island, Great Pacific Garbage Patch Adjacent. Sullivan Smith is interested in the inherent disconnect in contemporary consumer culture between purchasing and discarding goods. This work focuses on the single serving plastic package and her observation that consumer goods from vegetables to lamps are packaged in a shield of plastic that is discarded in order to use the item. What happens to these bits and wrappers, post-consumer, was the impetus to Private Island’s companion piece, Non Sequitur, a sculpture built from brightly colored plastic remnants of the current means of convenient and hygienic product consumption. The investigation of plastic’s life cycle revealed large islands of micro-plastics gathering in the oceans, the largest of which is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The print is an illustration of Sullivan Smith’s imagined natural environment for Non Sequitur. It suggests both an idealized notion of what happens to our waste and a dystopian perspective of the consequences of our conveniences.