This series stood out for the group exhibition Ground Zero in Moravany 2022. The impuls for the series of paintings Mermaids Tears is a new type of rock called Plastiglomerate, created by melted plastic waste at Kamilo Beach in Hawaii. The new rock material is the result of melted plastic waste on beaches, mixed with sediment, fragments of basaltic lava and organic debris such as seashells. The term Plastiglomerate was created in 2012 by geologist Patricia Corcoran and sculptor Kelly Jazvac. I think about Plastiglomerates as a sign of the zero point of the Anthropocene epoch.
I took the name Mermaids Tears from a poetic term for microplastics found in the ocean, mostly smaller than one centimeter in diameter. The series of paintings is also connected with the theme of archaeological imagination, as the artist, scientist and activist Pam Longobardi writes: “Plastic objects are the cultural archeology of our time, the future oil storage and the future fossils of the Anthropocene.”
The Mermaids Tears project reflects my thinking in recent years about waste production as a result of artistic practice, specifically working in a painter’s studio. At the same time, it reflects my effort to completely limit acrylic paints and media, industrially produced oil paints and other problematic material in the future. This transformation is difficult and is related to the effort to eliminate the use of plastics in everyday life.
The templates for the paintings are created by layering and blending different visual sources, such as photos of collected plastic waste, photos of found stones, and images of various everyday objects made of plastic found in online stores. Each visual element intertwines and connects like sediments. However, I wanted to achieve that some fragments of plastic objects remain recognizable in this mass, directly reflect their origin and retain the character of plastic material. The main component of colors is collected ash in my neighborhood and the binder is refined walnut oil. Therefore, the paintings are monochromatic in colors.
