"This piece is one of the first four of a series of larger fused 100% postconsumer plastic works that I began as a response to earning a grant for a thematic body of work. I have been working at fusing recycled sheet plastic, or basically garbage, into pieces which I call fodder, that are small 11 x 14 size. I then take those pieces and use them in the same way I would use paint on a canvas. Nothing in these finished pieces is paint! This is all color that was found as the original plastic piece, and then altered by layering various other colors of plastic over it and fusing those together into one sheet. I build the sheet bigger and bigger and consider composition as it grows. The hope is that I can use this plastic in a way that will replicate my more traditional, mixed media, acrylic paintings. It is certainly a complex and multi stage process that has taken me years of learning to manipulate the media in a way that gets the desired result. These paintings take a good deal of time, and are definitely labors of love. Even the final stage, where I add some gestural line, required some thought and agonizing over process. I really did not want to add these lines with another medium, so it took work to find the right way to create line which was also made of plastic. The gold leaf is the only thing that is not plastic. But gold leaf cannot be replicated, and I use it often in my paintings. So it has snuck its way, much to my delight. The final look of these pieces is bright, happy, joyful, vivid, and full of life, just as my paintings are considered to be. That makes me so happy, as that was the hope when I started this process. I feel that they do echo my mixed media paintings very well. But there is a whole other aspect to this work that is obviously not found in traditional work. I am honored to be taking literal garbage out of the recycling system and turning it into something that is beautiful. In the work, there are moments that remind the viewer that what they are seeing is not a canvas and not paint but clearly something they come in contact with every day. There are warning labels, recycling icons, well-known logos, and what is obviously packaging material all clearly left to be noticed when the work is viewed more closely. From a distance, these items become elements of the composition and design, and as the viewer approaches, it becomes more clear that exactly what they are seeing is garbage. I could not be more proud of the social statement this new body of work is making."

- Mary Payton

Prints are produced on demand on stretched canvas, acrylic plexi, or giclee fine art paper in a variety of sizes here in the United States.

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