Earth Awareness Month
In honor of Earth Month, Building 180 is proud to highlight artists Joel Dean Stockdill and Yustina Salnikova, who are dedicated to reimagining our relationship to “waste” through building life-size sculptures with reclaimed plastic and other discarded materials.
Ethyl the Blue Whale
“Ethyl,” named after polyETHYLine, is a life-sized, 82-foot-long blue whale sculpture made entirely of steel and recycled plastic. The artists originally built Ethyl for a commission by the Monterey Bay Aquarium and HUb Strategy & Communication.
With the support of Building 180, artists Joel Dean Stockdill and Yustina Salnikova set up a makeshift recycling center and facilitated educational workshops around plastic waste and consumption. In total, the artists along with dozens of volunteers hand-recycled over 5,000 pounds of plastic.
This massive artwork is intended to raise awareness around plastic waste and offer a design solution on how to reuse our waste. Plastic, when properly cleaned and treated, can be a valuable and nearly indestructible material. The Ethyl project exemplified that this simple change in perspective – waste as source material – can ignite discourse in finding solutions to environmental degradation.
“It’s a strange twist on our relationship with the whales,” Stockdill muses. “We [humans] used to kill them for their oil—now we’re turning oil-based plastics into a whale to try and help rid the oceans of plastic. Plastic is filling up our landfills and only nine percent of it has been recycled. As a society, we need to reduce our reliance on single-use plastic. That’s why I wanted to be a part of this effort.”
In 2019, Ethyl was awarded by the Guinness World Records as the world’s largest recycled plastic sculpture. In the same year, the art piece was acquired by Meow Wolf and transported from the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to the Santa Fe Community College, where it serves as a learning tool for students in the sustainability curriculum.
Fluke: a Tale of Plastic
"Fluke: A Tale of Plastic,” is a life-sized depiction of an adult gray whale tail, in the act of ‘fluking,’ or raising its fluke vertically above the surface in order to propel itself to the depths of the ocean. The sculpture is made from plastic bottles found during a Stand Up to Trash’s Sunday beach cleanup at Ocean Institute as well as reclaimed steel, 55-gallon barrels, and damaged curbside trash bins.
The sculpture was commissioned by the Dana Point Harbor Partners, for the Festival of Whales, which pays homage to the annual migration of California gray whales past Dana Point.
Sheila the Dire Wolf
Sheila, initially commissioned by the Maker Faire in 2018, is a large-scale dire wolf. She is made of excess materials from various construction projects for her steel frame and body; for example, her fur or skin is made up of gutters from a re-roofed house.
Working with reclaimed materials reminds the artists that each object has a story: they are formed by the earth, extracted, processed, transported, consumed and discarded – processes that have their own environmental and health impacts, and are
often overlooked by our modern consumer culture.
Today she lives at the SOMO Village, a live-work community in Northern California dedicated to sustainable living and community building.
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