Plastic dislocations: questions of labour and environment in <i>Plastic Heart</i>

In the 1960s, as plastics gained traction as the ubiquitous material of consumer objects, artists began to experiment with the properties of the newly available polymers. Plastics such as latex, fibreglass, acrylic and polyethylene offered access to aesthetic experimentation with colour, reflection, transparency and flexibility. Yet the use of these materials was never without critical reflection, an orientation that strengthened with the passing of time and the increased knowledge of plastics pollution. Though the connections are usually invisible, plastic artworks never stand alone, but in fact drag into the gallery the histories of their manufacture, the extraction of their base materials, their broken relationships with land and water, and their future propensity to break down into smaller pieces and proliferate endlessly. We use the example of the exhibition Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through, curated by the Synthetic Collective, to examine how plastics bring the complications of their materiality into the gallery. We argue that exhibition production should attend to both its fossil-fuel consumption and its relations to place. Plastic Heart provides an excellent case study of how plastics and plastics pollution can be dealt with critically within the space of a travelling exhibition.