Made With the Waste Abandoned In the Sea

Since she participated in a group exhibition of creating works with marine litter collected from Jeju beach in 2016, the artist Hyesun Lee has made abandoned buoys, fishing nets and floats the protagonists of her art. Among her most famous works there are a series of lanterns of different shapes called HAND LIGHTHOUSE, a lighthouse in a hand.

Made with the waste abandoned in the sea, the lanterns describe the virtuous circle through which waste takes on a new important and essential function, such as that performed by the lighthouse for ships sailing in the night sea.

The process of making these lamps consists of going and then ‘Beachcombing’ the abandoned sea waste plastics there. The plastic that has stranded on the beach after a long float in the waves, takes on a new look given by colors faded by sunlight, and crushed and scratched surfaces. Hyesun Lee then makes various metal shapes using handcrafted techniques such as silversmithing, fabrication, welding, screw connection and cold joining technique, and then completes the individual works by combining them properly with the polished marine plastic waste.

The sea waste plastic lighting objects, reborn by the artist’s hands, not only reduce and recycle marine plastic waste, but also present a new opportunity and solution on how to reuse the abandoned and consumed waste.