Shining DESPAIR
Wiebke Pandikow
Finland
Brooch “Bread Basket 5 biodegradable”, 2024
Plastic bags labelled biodegradable, stainless steel, 65x115x35mm
Coiling
Biodegradable plastic bags have been reworked into a basket-like object to be worn as a brooch, utilizing the age-old technique of coiling. Using our hands to work fibres from our immediate natural environment, gathering and creating and slowly building up skills over generations – in other words, craft – is deeply human. Hunters and gatherers have lived skillfully off their immediate environment for thousands of years, using materials directly at hand. The materials at hand though, have changed, the environment irreparably altered.
In slow and careful construction, layer by layer, a modern waste material has been reworked with a technique which appears in the archeological record all over the world since the Neolithic. It becomes an object of adornment and a quiet appeal for the value of re-learning old skills and re-evaluating materials; for using craft to shape our world with a caring, careful touch.