PLASTIC BAGS

by Hattie Ellis (Salisbury)

She worked as a secretary, brought up two children and did watercolour classes. Then her teenagers showed how art had metamorphosed into the many forms: film, junk, textiles. Going to college, aged 45, she struggled to make concepts.

Her drive to class was lined with plastic bags trapped in the hedgerows. One remained in the same tree for 2 years. We each use 130 a year; they take 500-700 years to decompose. What to do? She scrunched one up to depict a knotty problem.

The twisted bags grew into totems; then to lupins that were planted in a park to photograph. They came to an exhibition in the Market Place library. Visitors scudded past daffodils made out of Quality Street toffee wrappers and asked questions.

The art was uplifting but it was her life that most caught my heart. She had found freedom in her son and daughter's world; she had caught the vital spark that wants, forever, to get the world to see and feel and think anew.

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What Hattie Ellis says about PLASTIC BAGS:

Suzie Gutteridge had an exhibition of her beautiful and environmentally-based work in the gallery space of the Library in Market Place. Lots of people were asking questions and so did I.