Artivist Carolyn Cardinet: Exploring Sustainable Art

We spoke to the gorgeous artivist Carolyn Cardinet, a visual artist who works with waste. She is a multi media installation artist, and makes stunning installations, wearables, necklaces, earrings and sculpture made of single waste plastics she sources.

She has dedicated her whole artistic career to sustainability and sustainable art, and we at Sustainaroo Travels are blown away by her creativity and unbelievable things she can do with the single use plastics she finds on the road.

Podcast Interview- Video & Audio Versions

Interview Transcript (coming soon):

Coming soon

Over time, Carolyn realised she has become an activist. She didn’t mean to, she says she is an “accidental activist” who uses art to build awareness, called an Artivist. She did study in art, and over time found herself mainly focusing on sustainable art. She loves to experiment and play with different materials. She finds lots of different things on the walks around St Kilda, near the city of Melbourne in Australia. There’s lots of plastic to be found on the beach, and also randomly on the streets. 

An example she made recently is an installation made from optical lenses, which she asked the local optometrist to collect for her, that they no longer need after people change the lenses in their glasses frames. These are sewn together with wire from bottle tops that she collects and flattens. Originally she was going to make this into a wearable dress, however it was a little too see through and cheeky, even with dark sunglass lenses! This was in her studio and in the interview.

Carolyn has a beautiful studio at The Grove Studios in St Kilda at Veg Out, a local community garden area. She works on projects locally, like exhibitions, classes, speaking at schools and kindergartens, and participating at festivals. As an artivist, she also does artist residencies all over the world.

She often goes for walks, and will see a new material that sparks her interest, thrown away on the street, and she picks it up and takes it home. Then over time she collects a box of that same material, and when there is enough, she makes something out of it. She never wastes any of it, therefore she doesn’t create any waste from her art (even though it was “waste” in the first place).

Another example is the installation art she made out of inner tubes from bikes, which was also in her studio when we did the interview. She found quite a collection just on the paths of St Kilda, where people had to stop and repair their bike and left the inner tube from the wheel of their bike right there on the street where they were.

Carolyn has collected hundreds of these and has made a jellyfish structure that hangs from the ceiling. She wants to have a performance, maybe in a laneway, to showcase this – perhaps having a performing artist coming out of the jellyfish. 

She also wore a necklace made of bike inner tubes, and earrings that have not only bike inner tubes but also the plastic outer case of a SIM card from when she was travelling. 

Carolyn has also found a lot of inspiration using baling twine that is littered over the ground of farms in the countryside. She found it for the first time when she was at a residency on a farm, and she started seeing this twine everywhere and realised it was the twine that keeps the bales of hay together. She found thirty five bits of twine a day on the ground when living there. She collected quite a lot and has made a few sculptures and installations out of it.

She also sourced some plastic sheets that were wrapped around furniture used in transporting it, and she unweaves the individual strands of plastic from the sheets. She uses the thread to sew and put together her sculptures. 

She has collected face masks, she washes them and she is working on an outfit using them. She has made something out of fishing twine using crochet. She uses different techniques and bricolage,  basically she finds things that are available and turns them into something. Sewing, crocheting, attaching. 

She has a necklace made from the pull tab of aluminium cans. People often throw it away on the street, and cars drive over them which flattens them. Ironically, Carolyn reminds us that aluminium is a valuable metal and can and should be reused (not to mention it has a good recycling chain). It is sad to see it thrown away on the street everywhere. 

Have a look through some of her sculptures and wearables here.

The Impact of Art on Society

She told us about the impact of art on society: how art has a wonderful power. Art has the ability to bring a visual of the climate conversation, which helps us understand climate action. Carolyn uses her art to show the excess waste, showing us how much plastic pollution is just outside our door and literally on the street we walk on every day. This also points to how much plastic pollution is in the ocean as well. 

Carolyn got into sustainability originally because she loves walking on the beach and she kept noticing all the plastic rubbish left on the beach after the people had gone. Once you start noticing the rubbish, you can’t stop, and you just keep seeing more and more of it, she says.

She started to get concerned about her children’s future, and her grandchildren’s future, and how it will look if we keep doing what we have been doing. She went onto do Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project training in Brisbane. And Port Phillip’s Environmental (Sustainability) Leadership Program and has also done many other art and environmental studies.

Carolyn uses her beautiful sculptures to encourage us to limit the use of single use plastics especially, but also plastic in general – and to remember that any plastic we do need to use, has to be placed in the correct bin afterwards.

When it comes to connecting to sustainable art, anywhere you go in the world, you can look up sustainable art and find like minded people, classes and exhibitions. Look up sustainable art, sustain-art, eco-art, and artivist, and you will find!

Also check out Climarte for ideas, projects and exhibitions. Climarte is an organisation that collaorates with artists, and artivists, and scientists, to create campaigns for change.

Movies About Sustainability

Here are some movies about sustainability that Carolyn recommended. You can watch them to build up some awareness but also hope about sustainability issues, and you can suggest a viewing with a group of friends to spread awareness too.

  • 2040 – showcases a future where sustainability solutions have been implemented at scale, and what that might look like.
  • Future Council – a Dutch documentary about eight children go on a road trip in a biofuel bus to challenge leaders and find solutions to the climate crisis.
  • Demain (Tomorrow) – a French film that optimistically looks at potential solutions to environmental and social challenges.
  • War on Waste – an interesting deep dive into Australia’s waste crisis.

Carolyn Cardinet’s Sustainable Art  and Recycled Plastic Art Projects, Shows, Exhibitions, Workshops, Classes

Carolyn runs sustainability art workshops and classes, and random weaving workshops in the local area. Her work with kids includes helping them make recycled plastic art projects using waste she has found, things like plastic bottles and caps and making marine life out of them as art with the kids. She also does classes with people with disabilities. If possible she takes the class to the beach to collect plastic themselves as part of the experience.

Carolyn loves to encourage artists and artivists to become more creative, and not just ‘do craft’. She says let’s expand our vision of what art can be. Anything can be art, it just depends how you present it.

Here is an example of one of her exhibitions held earlier this year (2024).

Keep an eye on her social media for upcoming exhibitions!

Sustainable Art and Performance Collaborations

Carolyn often does collaborations with local performance artist Gabrielle. They met at RMIT whilst doing their masters degrees, and Carolyn thought it would be great to have someone perform in the wearables that she makes. Gabrielle loved the idea and the two of them have made quite a few very interesting collaborations. These are statement pieces about plastic waste and the environment. 

One performance they did together was Gabrielle dressed as an anemone that was dying, and it was to raise awareness about bleached coral. Coral bleaching is what happens if coral is stressed, it will release algae which causes it to turn white. Changes in ocean temperature or pollution causes the algae to leave the coral, which leaves the coral vulnerable. Turning white doesn’t mean the coral is dead, it means it is stressed, but if the stress doesn’t stop then the coral will die eventually.

This wonderful organisation called Coral Gardeners is replanting new coral in the ocean and having great results:

Here is the collaboration Carolyn and Gabrielle did about it:

They also collaborate on window displays, and have photos, film, Carolyn’s art on display as well as using the art in performance. Carolyn says it is wonderful to see her art embodied!

Here are more collaborations and interviews, on Carolyn’s website, scroll down to check out the full video of the dying anemone to do with the coral bleaching.

Beach Trash

Carolyn finds it very sad looking around a beach and seeing how much beach trash is everywhere. She knows that most of us, when we walk on the beach, just don’t see the trash – and most of the trash is plastic. But when we start seeing it, we can’t stop, it is everywhere.

Carolyn decided to make a statement about beach trash and plastic pollution on the beach by making a dress out of plastic she found on the beach and wearing it in a video. Have a look at the breathtaking video she made here. She used beach trash and marine debris that she found on loval beaches, and sewed it all into a dress and walked down the beach with it.

She wanted to spread awareness about beach litter. People leave all kids of rubbish on the beach – and the plastic just stays there, as it doesn’t degrade. Baby bottle tops, dummies, chip packets, dental floss sticks, glasses that have fallen out of people’s bags, balloons, and anything else you can think of.

Most people wouldn’t mean to litter on the beach, it’s usually a lack of awareness and priorities. Let’s do our beautiful coast a favour and make sure that anything we bring to the beach comes home with us – all rubbish and belongings. 

We have a societal norm that if our dog does a poo, on the street or on the beach, we pick it up. However people seem to feel comfortable leaving rubbish and plastic everywhere they go, and plastic harms our environment.

Carolyn is also passionate about beach clean ups – go to them in your local area and help your beach!

Tangaroa Blue is an organisation that Carolyn recommends and has worked with. They organise beach clean ups and other projects to protect the ocean from marine debris which can injure or kill marine and coastal wildlife, and contributes to a lot of other issues as well.

Plastic Pollution – Why Should We Avoid Plastics?

Carolyn told us about the problems with plastic and why we should avoid plastic. There are many types of plastic being made and used every day in the world, 40-50 types. But only about 7 types are recyclable. However, whether it is recyclable or not is not even the biggest question. The problem is, is it being recycled? Only 9% of all the plastic we have made in the world has been recycled. 

In the 1950s when they created plastic, and it was ,marketed as a wonderful tool, having ads that said you can eat dinner out of plastic plates and then the whole thing goes in the bin – no washing up! To sell lots of plastic, the industry had to show and teach people to use disposable products and get used to throwing them away after one use. And now we have the big mess that was left, and is being left, by these practices.

Here is a great video explaining it:

They made all of this plastic knowing very well that it wasn’t recyclable. The plastic problem is huge, and we just keep making more of it. Sadly, there has been a lot of plastic positive marketing, as plastic is such a strong material, waterproof, convenient, and cheap to produce. 

Unfortunately however it doesn’t interact with our human habitat very well. Such a sad and preventable disaster…we are drip feeding into our own habitat, throwing piles of a material into our own eco system that is killing the eco system itself.

As a species, we have reached such a level of self sabotage that we are making ourselves endangered. And we now know that plastic is hurting us, but the systems we have in place all rely on plastic at the moment. We are hoping small changes lead to big changes in the way we manufacture, use and dispose of plastic items with time.

For example, Carolyn told us about how when a car is being manufactured, to make the bumper bars, the machine that makes them has to get to the right temperature and if it’s not right, the bumper bar won’t be solid enough. So they will keep trying to make the right one to the correct specifications, and will need to keep trying until they get it right, so for each bumper bar that is correct, there is between 9 and 20 that are thrown away.

This type of manufacturing issue happens across many fields and types of manufacturing, and you can imagine the kind of waste that is happening all over the world.

Another problem with plastic is, it comes from oil (fossil fuel), which is extracted from the ground, which is quite an expensive and laborious process. The oil is then transported, it then refined, then it is transported again to be made into pellets. The pellets are like little balls of plastic, sorted by colours. The pellets are then transported to a manufacturer, and become the base of plastic products. They are melted and then moulded into the shapes they need to become, for example made into a plastic bottle.

The bottles are then transported, to be filled with milk for example. After being filled, the milk bottles are transported to the shops and then you buy them! And you use the milk for a couple of days, and then you throw away the bottle. What an incredible amount of processes had to happen for one person to use a milk bottle for a couple of days.

A huge amount of transport, resources, petrol to transport it and everything else. And what happens to it after we throw it away? Most of them end in landfill as we don’t have the infrastructure in place to recycle them all.

Water bottles are a great and ironic example. Water is collected from a water source, packed into a bottle, stored, transported, and then used for a few minutes, and then what happens to the bottle? Also having food stored in plastic may be leaching unhealthy things into the water and food.

Have more of a read about why we should avoid plastic here.

Plastic pollution is a term for any plastic that ends up in the environment. It flows into the gutters, and down into the rivers, and has been found in the highest mountains and the deepest oceans, and the deepest trenches in the ocean.

In the ocean, some plastic floats, and creates swirls and ‘islands’ of plastic, because of the currents.

Here is a video about the great garbage patch:

Another issue in the ocean is the effect plastic has had on the albatross at Midway Island, or Midway Atoll, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The albatross have nests and babies there, and the albatross find a lot of plastic that they accidentally ingest and then feed to their chicks.

They eat it because after being in the ocean for a while, the plastic smells like algae and food as small particles cling to the plastic. After a few months of ingesting plastic, the baby chicks die of malnutrition as they don’t get enough real food, and their bellies are full of plastic. They also can’t fly with their heavy bellies full of plastic. Here is a BBC story about it and some more info here about plastic pollution in the ocean.

This problem is not only in the albatross at Midway Island, the plastic inside bellies and bodies problem is everywhere, from krill to the largest whales.When it starts to break into smaller pieces, instead of biodegrading and becoming one with the environment, it just becomes smaller and smaller, and tiny pieces of plastic end up inside animals, and inside us.

We all eat about a credit card amount of plastic every year. We are ingesting and inhaling plastic, tiny parts end up in our blood, organs, and human foetuses and placentas:

And unfortunately recycling is not really an answer, even though we have this general idea that recycling is helping the situation. There are many types of plastic, but only a few are actually recyclable, and even those that are recyclable – we don’t have the infrastructure to actually be recycling it. So usually it ends up in landfill. Even those that are being recycled, plastic cannot keep being recycled again and again so it will eventually end up in landfill. Conversely, glass and metal can be recycled forever and we have infrastructure in place to be doing that.

So What Can We Do to Help?

It can be very discouraging to read about these things, however there’s a lot being done in the world, and taking small steps makes a big difference. When we know better, we can do better as a global society.

Carolyn Cardinet uses her art to spread awareness about the issue. As an artivist, she showcases waste and what we can do differently. So let’s go over some things we can all do to help the ocean recover and to stop plastic pollution:

  • limit the use of single use plastics, and the ones you do use, make sure they go to a proper recycling plant
  • buy second hand
  • attend beach clean ups
  • support organisations that are making a difference
  • make sure all rubbish comes home with you and ends up in the appropriate bin (not on the streets or beaches)
  • use only reef safe sunscreen and ocean safe beauty products
  • as much as possible aim to use and buy glass, metal or cardboard packaged items – and buy in bulk to limit containers
  • grow your own veggies, and shop at farmers markets
  • vote for political parties that support sustainability
  • support sustainable art and help spread awareness
  • have a little fun with trying Plastic Free July:

Check Out Carolyn Cardinet & Her Work

https://www.carolyncardinet.com

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