Chris Jordan is a well known digital artist who has taken to recycling e-waste and other trash into amazing pieces of artwork. One of his recent exhibitions, “Running The Numbers” consisted of statistically significant amounts of batteries, cell phones, circuit boards and other consumer waste to show how big of an issue waste is. His newest piece called Gyre, takes a look at the Pacific Garbage Patch and the staggering amount of plastic waste floating in the Pacific ocean. You may recognize the picture as The Great Wave at Kanagawa by the famous Japanese wood block printer, Hokusai. But what you may not be able to tell from this first picture is that it is made out of 2.4 million plastic pieces.

The North Pacific Gyre is one of the 5 major ocean currents and is also well-known for having a very high concentration of suspended plastic pieces. In fact it is estimated that 2.4 million pieces of plastic enter the world’s oceans every hour. Put into such a statistically visual representation, you can almost begin to grasp what a massive problem this is. Plastic in the presence of sunlight will photodegrade into smaller and smaller pieces, until it is small enough for animals to ingest it, thus bringing harmful toxins into the food chain. Many other people are also trying to draw awareness to the Pacific Garbage Patch, like David Rothschild who set forth recently in a boat made out of plastic bottles.

Jordan’s amazing piece of eco-art not only has an important message, but is also wondrously beautiful. The Great Wave by Hokusai is an iconic image representing the interaction between man and nature, and how often nature has the upper hand and man is just trying to survive. Jordan’s version of The Great Wave suggests almost the opposite – that man is instead attacking nature.  The Wave and the negative space of the sky also resemble a map of the rotating North Pacific Gyre with Mt. Fuji sitting approximately where Hawaii is. “In addition to being an evocative seascape with lots of layers of metaphor, the painting is a clever yin-yang symbol, with several yin-yang relationships being suggested,” says Jordan.

As you zoom in on the picture, you will be able to see individual pieces of plastic, like bottle caps, combs and toothbrushes. All of the pieces for Jordan’s Gyre actually came from the Pacific Ocean, which means he gets bonus points for using recycled materials for his artwork.

via Inhabitat