Bottle Caps – Mary Ellen Croteau

Bottle Caps - Mary Ellen Croteau

What to do with all the plastic waste we create? It is made from petroleum. It doesn’t compost or decompose. And what little is recycled creates its own pollution. So Mary Ellen made art with this waste.

CLOSE is a large self-portrait made of 7000+ plastic bottle caps. It took 7 months to build, and two years to collect enough caps.

Her final works were large scale images ecological disasters, also made of bottle caps. Through this work with plastic, she intended to make this waste visible and to make the connection between our throw-away culture and our responsibility to the earth.

“Single-serve plastic bottles are the worst of the worst and should be assiduously avoided,” she wrote. “Excessive packaging comes next. We need to rethink our needs and our desires if we are going to save this planet.”

CLOSE 2011

Plastic bottle caps – like bags, a plastic product that can’t be/ isn’t recycled. I conceived of an “endless column” of these caps, after Constantin Brancussi’s iconic modernist sculpture. One became two, and two became many. While making these columns, I noticed the smaller caps tended to nest inside one another, and the color combinations reminded me of Chuck Close’s painted portraits. So I got sidetracked and started on a large self-portrait made entirely of bottle caps. The piece measures 8 feet by 7 feet. No paint is used, except to delineate a few shadows where white board was showing through. In a few cases, the caps are trimmed in order to fit a tight space.

The hard part: washing and sanitizing each bottle cap

Bottle Cap Eyes

“My Eye” began this series, which at 30” x 38” is about 5 times the detail of the eye in “CLOSE,” her large self-portrait.

Continuing a series of bottle cap eyes: Rúrí, Larry, Jia, Quinn, Alicia, Paige, John, ISM Lockport and Elin, Örebro (Sweden). In Elin’s eye is reflected a bit of skyline from that city, where she did an installation of columns in June 2013 for OpenART, the city’s summer arts festival.

HOW TO MAKE A BOTTLE CAP MURAL

(IT’S NOT AS EASY AS IT LOOKS!)

Mary Ellen used particle board for the base (peg board with the holes already drilled every inch is a good surface, and can be mounted with screws in the holes that show through). This is also a good way to size up your image, using the one inch grid already there with the holes. She attached the caps initially with poster tac, to position them. When she had a section I was happy with, she used a hot glue gun to permanently attach them.

You cannot use craft-store hot glue sticks, they don’t have the binding material you need. You must use industrial glue. You will need a high temp glue gun. You need to make sure the glue is at hottest melt to really stick.

Caps can be made of 5 different chemical compositions, some are more durable and some are more brittle. Omni Bond is the only glue she found which adheres to all those types. Be aware that plastic is not archival, it will fade and crack especially if put in sunlight.

One more thing: you must carefully wash and sanitize each cap. Rinsing isn’t enough, even if it looks clean. Otherwise, you could attract a lot of roaches and other insects and such. Mary Ellen washes her caps by hand, or put them in a mesh bag in the washing machine on gentle. Soaking them for a bit in the pre-wash cycle can help.

Mary Ellen Croteau, USA

PROFILE

MARY ELLEN CROTEAU was an artist whose work directly addresses the absurdities of social norms, and lays bare the underlying bias and sexist assumptions on which our culture is constructed. She worked with non-recycled plastic waste, in an effort to demonstrate the huge amounts of trash we are consuming and sending into the environment.

From 2006 to 2017 Mary Ellen hosted a window gallery in the Hermosa neighborhood of Chicago. She featured a different local or international artist every month.

Mary Ellen lived and worked in Chicago, IL

Main Research Source

BOTTLE CAPS (2010-2019)
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