URBAN TUMBLEWEED

Tumbleweed looking for community on Bank St, Whangārei, Aotearoa. 2023.

The work gestures toward the intersections of performance, material culture, and environmental discourse, offering a critical and aesthetic reflection on the ongoing legacy of plastics in our world. The Urban Tumbleweed project explores the entanglement of ancient energy, ecological crisis, and human performance. Drawing upon plastic as the embodiment of aeons-old energy, once extracted from its natural resting place and now transformed into everyday objects, the work contemplates this primordial force’s regeneration and continued movement. Specifically, it examines how soft plastic waste—products of the Anthropocene—becomes active agents within contemporary environments, symbolically seeking community as they traverse urban landscapes.

The project metaphorically reimagines the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as a new "Land of the Dinosaur," where these synthetic materials, originating from the Earth's prehistoric past, accumulate and take on new forms. In this sense, Urban Tumbleweed serves as a durational, site-responsive performance in which the very materials of plastic recycling embody movement, temporality, and place. Soft plastics collected from households and workplaces are taped together to create a fabric that forms the hand-me-down from our late capitalist society to create a costume worn by the performer. The performer inhabits this costume, embodying both the slowness and agency of the materials, which are influenced by the dynamics of the site, nature's currents, and the guiding presence of the audience. This embodiment invites the audience to witness the animated nature of these synthetic particles as they re-enter the environment through movement.