An emerging artist creates inventive work from plastic

Bottom line: Emerging Atlanta artist Amandine Drouet finds a novel use for trash in her solo show

Forward Arts Foundation has been bestowing Atlanta artists with an annual $10,000 cash prize and featured exhibition at Buckhead's Swan Coach House Gallery since 1999. Since the award's inception, $190,000 has been given, no small feat in an art scene where such gifts are few and far between.

This year’s winner of the emerging artist award is Amandine Drouet, a French-born, Georgia State University graduate. Drouet is sort of a fiber artist of post-industrial consumer waste who stitches plastic grocery bags, bubble wrap and plastic packaging into tapestries that suggest a quilt-maker with a Mad Max-sensibility, transforming refuse into art.

Work by the emerging artist finalists Jessica Caldas, Chris Chambers, Henry Detweiler and Chantelle Rytter is also on display at Swan Coach House Gallery.

Drouet’s material of choice turns out to be incredibly adaptable, malleable and expressive.

Titled “Plastique,” Drouet’s solo show features an array of the artist’s trash tapestries as well as photographs of beautifully melted plastic water bottles and a mobile featuring six-pack plastic rings dangling from the ceiling. Brightly-colored plastic is formed into fat, gypsy moth-type cocoons suspended from that plastic webbing, bringing Drouet’s plastic medium fully into the third-dimension.

Like another local artist, Georgia State University professor Pam Longobardi, who also creates installations from the sort of weathered, abraded plastic bits that wash up on beaches around the world, Drouet takes a material associated with landfills and consumer waste run amok and forms it into something lovely.

In a suite of photographs, Drouet captures the patterns of holes burned with a soldering knife into plastic bottles. The effect of that burning is varied. In some close-up images the patterns are prismatic and web-like while others have the appearance of some magnified microorganism. In other works, Drouet melts plastic to create paint-like effects, with swaths of color that mimic the look of traditional painting.

From a distance, Drouet’s trash tapestries look like swirls of intensely-hued acrylic paint, swirling and blending into rivers of lime green, hot pink, orange, red and yellow. Up close, it’s a different matter entirely. Rather than paint, Drouet’s medium is pieces of plastic held together with colorful thread that sometimes dangles from her surfaces. You can make out the mascots of various products, sewn into Drouet’s large plastic tapestry: kittens, pine cones, trees, bears, horses and pigs. The irony in these works — crafted entirely from trash — is how often the natural world is evoked in these human-made products. In “La Terre ne Tourne pas Rond,” Drouet hangs a large work of bits and pieces of colorful plastic sewn into a round tapestry within a large white metal hoop of her own fabrication that suggests an embroidery hoop. In “Chateau Plastique,” Drouet uses images of birds and houses from plastic packaging alongside shades of green and blue to evoke the natural world of sky and earth. The artist is expressing an environmental consciousness, in formulating a use for plastic beyond the recycling bin. But she is also injecting her work with a fair amount of humor to keep things from getting too strident.