Mr. K’s in Art: Changing How We See Plastic and the Environment thru Bottle Caps

A Vision
     It started with divine inspiration. Lauren Blissett was struck by an urgency to find an alternative home for all the plastic bottle caps that end up in the landfill here on the Big Island. She had no idea what she was going to do with them, or why it had to be bottle caps. But the message was very clear: just do this.
     Her collection of bottle caps fit into a small bag, as her family doesn’t drink that many bottled beverages. But one day as she was driving past Mr. K’s Recycle & Redemption Center, the steering wheel seemed to turn by itself. Suddenly, there she was, surrounded by plastic bottles and caps. A regular customer who often brought her HI5's to Mr. K's, Lauren wasn't sure how to frame her request to instead take something away. “I was like, could I stand there with a separate trash can?” she recalled. The handler wasn’t sure, and referred her to Connie Bee, one of the office staff. Connie agreed, and Lauren’s collection of bottle caps began to grow.

Caps Can Be Pretty Gross
     Several weeks or months might pass between when a beverage was consumed, when a customer brought their containers to Mr. K’s, and when Lauren picked them up from Connie. By the time she brought them to her aunt’s house in Puna, they were pretty gnarly. “I didn’t want to touch them with my hands,” she admitted.
     She devised a four-step cleaning process in her aunt’s garden, which involved soaking the caps in buckets of different concentrations of bleach, rinsing them with a high-powered hose, and then drying them out on a shower curtain and later a door screen laid over a pair of sawhorses. Each soaking lasted two to three days, and the whole process lasted two weeks.
     By the time one batch reached the final stage, Mr. K’s would call to say she could pick up another. “Connie would ask what I was doing with all these caps,” Lauren said, “and I would say it’s for an art project, but really, I had no idea.” Months passed and her pile of caps grew.

From Landfill to Art
     In late July, Lauren and her son attended a workshop to make jellyfish out of plastic bottles at the Volcano Art Center (VAC) by visiting Māori artist and environmental activist George Tamihana Nuku. The exhibit featured beautiful sea creatures constructed out of single-use plastics and styrofoam. George and the VAC had planned a large-scale art installation engaging the community in creating art to “explore our changing oceans and changing identities due to the proliferation of single-use plastics in our modern world” (VAC). Titled Changing Oceans: Changing Minds, George had envisioned a symbolic map of Hawai`i Island surrounded by plastic marine life and sea birds, but hadn’t yet decided what the map would be constructed of. Then his and Lauren's paths crossed, and she was put in charge of creating a map of bottle caps.
     George and some other community volunteers bound together layers of donated styrofoam used in packaging and, together with another volunteer with degrees in art and geography, sculpted it into a relief map of the island. Then it was layered with plaster filler and a base coat, and Lauren painted it charcoal with white at the summits of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. Meanwhile, George was holding workshops with school groups, during which keiki sorted the bottle caps by color and pounded nails into them.

Photo credit: L Blissett

Lauren Blissett paints the styrofoam relief map in an outdoor workspace at the Volcano Art Center.

     The lively color scheme of the map is laughingly described by Lauren as more “artistic” than literal, having been somewhat dictated by bottle cap availability. She had initially planned to do the map entirely in shades of green, but there weren’t enough caps. Big Island residents seem to drink a lot of Gatorade, as there were multitudes of orange caps, which together with some black caps, were used to suggest some lava flows, though not exactly. Blue caps depicted river placements, with an outline of blue to suggest the ocean, as well as to free up some needed green caps. The end creation is lively and familiar, while also encouraging viewers to discover their own associations.

Photo credit: L Blissett

The island in process, with boxes of color-sorted caps with nails.

Ending Single-Use Plastic by Changing How We See Its Value
     Aside from the fun and creativity of the community project, Lauren was deeply inspired by George’s philosophy. “His perspective is that ultimately plastic is made using petroleum, which is very old and comes from deep inside the earth,” she explains, which gives it a sense of sacredness and divinity, almost like our kūpuna (elders). “The issue isn’t plastic itself, but the way we value it. We see plastic as disposable – just use it one time and throw it away. We don’t see all the possibilities of what you can do with plastic after you finish your drink,” Lauren said. “It’s the same with styrofoam.”
      “We must transform our relationship with plastic and the environment if we want to preserve our environment,” George explained.
     In an article exploring George's work, Karen Jacobs goes deeper into how George wants to end the single use of plastic by demonstrating the “divinity of plastic(s)” through using plastic in his creations. In addition to community engagement, George Tamihana Nuku, who is of Māori descent, has also created contemporary responses in plastic of historic Māori objects on display at the University of Cambridge. 
     Visit the Volcano Art Center to see Lauren Blissett’s bottle cap map and experience Changing Oceans: Changing Minds by George Nuku. Hurry! The exhibition ends on September 10th, after which time it will find a more permanent home at the Keiki Science Museum in Kona.