Chelsea Wrightson

Altars of Imperfection are bas-relief oil paintings made of poured plaster castings from my collection of disposable single-use plastics. The plaster castings are set in harmonic compositions, locked in space with poured plaster, and finished with mixed media: oil, acrylic, colored pencil, spray paint and spackling. This body of work is an alchemical shift from waste to altar; at once a reflection of our reverence for single-use materials, a nod to their permanent fossilized deposits, and an imagined world beyond their use and proliferation.

I have been collecting my single-use plastics. As they were piling up around me, I began to see their beauty and think about the designers of these vessels of planned obsolescence. This collecting has seeped into my meditations. What I’ve come to realize is, it is embedded in us, it is embedded in economic systems and ecosystems. These altars are a way for me to look at and hold space for my accountability in the waste stream. After creating these works I am left with the question”what kind of mark are we leaving on the earth and on a smaller level - our spiritual psyches?”

Our understanding of inter-being has been driven into binaries but the universe is more complex than that. Humans are more complex than that. Since the rise of colonialism, industrialism, and capitalism we have been heavily influenced by scarcity, individualism, competition, materialism, and consumption. By creating these bodies of work I seek to reconcile my relationships with living beings and the giving earth. I meditate on past patterns and new potentials where collaboration, sustainability, empathy, care, mindfulness, abundance, resourcefulness and reciprocity are able to flourish.