Richard Lang & Judith Selby Lang

Nurdles: the mermaid's tears

curated by Lucy Van Sands Seeburg

May 3-25 2008

North of the Hawaiian Islands a huge raft of floating plastic debris cycles in an island bigger than the state of Texas. We have discovered that this plastic does not degrade, but only rubs itself to ever-smaller pieces, planktonic in size- a killing meal for the next in line on the food chain.

In a telescopic to microscopic series of images, we present the near invisible story of nurdles, a particularly noxious component of the plastic flotsam. Nurdles are the raw plastic material that is shipped to manufacturers of bottles, car parts, toys, almost anything made of plastic. The real danger with nurdles is their absorptive capability. They are tiny magnets for metabolites, PCB's, breakdown products of DDT—DDE and other dioxin-like substances. They are poisonous little bombs loaded with tens of 1000's of times more poison than the ambient sea, and because they are translucent they are mistaken for fish eggs, they enter the food chain.
           
We intend with this exposition to make big what we don’t see; to focus on our indiscriminate use of plastics. We are mining fossil hydrocarbons for heating our houses and workplaces, for driving our planes and trains and automobiles, and yet, we only vaguely understand that we are using much of the irreplaceable primordial remnants of Carboniferous fern bogs, laid down 300,000,000 million years ago, to make plastic that we so blithely toss away.

What began nine years ago as a peripatetic beach-combing exercise- to just clean up one single beach, Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore-has grown into a minor industry. Two people shaping the three and a half tons of plastic debris into some works of art pointing toward one simple aspect of our environmental catastrophe. The human race is discarding willy-nilly, fully one third of the hydrocarbons we now extract, hydrocarbons useful in a happier future, chucked for convenience and short-term profit motive. Besides the disturbing fact that our children's patrimony is being sent to the dumps, a lot of it is showing up in the oceans.