Unwrapping: sustainable happiness art during a pandemic

We are Goldberg Aberline Studio (GAS), two Australian artists who want to “save the world” in our own small way. We are passionate about telling human stories, and we make huge outrageous public inflatable artworks about sustainability, social inclusion and cultural diversity.

In 2020 we decided to do something different. It was the height of the Covid lockdowns in Australia and the whole world was feeling intense uncertainty and anxiety about the future of our planet. We’ve always believed that creativity and the sense of joy and connection it brings has the power to change the world. We felt that positive change was possible, so we decided to take things into our own hands.

We put the word out to remote Australian communities who felt the same as we did - a sense of isolation due to Covid and feelings of anxiety around our unsustainable consumption practices.

We thought “how do we get the attention of as many people as possible as quickly as possible?” Remembering the saying of our grandparents “all that glitters isn’t gold” - we realised that single use plastic wrappers are designed to lure us into consuming unsustainable materials. Basically, the prettiest plastics were also the most dangerous.

So this formed our idea: what if we got communities and schools to collect their single use plastics for a few weeks and really confront the amount of wrappers they waste? What if we asked these communities to actually take part in the creation process and make something incredible out of the material they would usually throw in the bin? The process put a new value on waste through craft and creativity.

Thus was born our latest collaborative public art project: Unwrapping. For the first time ever in Australia, thousands of plastic waste materials were collected by remote communities across NSW and collaboratively transformed by GAS into a huge public art project.

A small country town called Grafton became the community most engaged with this project. Hundreds of participants were invited to collect wrappers from their homes and re-imagine them into creative artworks. We held wonderful collaging workshops via zoom and later in person in schools, art groups and galleries across the New South Wales region (as Covid restrictions lifted).

The result? Day by day, thousands of hand-cut (with scissors!) mosaics made from plastic wrappers arrived by mail to the GAS studio in Sydney, created by the community and made entirely from single use material that would've otherwise ended up as waste.

Once we got hold of these incredible, unique mosaic artworks - our crazy build process began! We are inflatable experts and have developed specific technologies and processes to transform materials into huge inflatable sculptures. Our community-made plastic artworks were integrated into the textile body of the sculptural work. We wanted the piece to be as sustainable as possible, wherever possible. The body of the inflatable is made from 100% recycled PET bottles, and the work integrates biodegradable films.

The final sculptural piece features hundreds of community made collages sculpted into towering waves forms we call ‘waves of change’ and the installation features a mural made from additional community artworks, some made live on site.

Eighteen months after we began Unwrapping, our public artwork was unveiled at the Grafton Regional Gallery. Our residency included the launch of our latest inflatable sculpture, and a weekend of collaborative art making inside the gallery. This time in the gallery was an incredible time to connect to the general public through creativity, and have powerful converstaions around petrochemical plastics and mure sustainable options like plastics made from home-compostable cellulose.

So… scissors. How could we have done this without them? Our Fiskars scissors were key to unlocking creativity for everyone who was involved in this project. Hundreds of community members gathered together in person and online, cutting and collaging material. Cutting became the new knitting circle! During the height of covid, Unwrapping was a vital creative outlet for 100s of people and a way for them to connect with others during a time of isolation. By mobilising hundreds of people to make thousands of artworks out of single use plastic, we have shown just how much change art can make.