After receiving a package where the plastic footprint far outweighed the product itself, I felt a need to transform that waste into art. What began as a photo documenting a mountain of plastic waste under my colorful dining room lights was digitally distilled into a series of mandalas. These pieces represent a double-edged sword: the ability to find transcendent beauty in the mundane, and the unsettling realization that I used additional resources—electricity, processing power, time—to create this beauty, and ultimately wound up discarding the materials. It is a sobering meditation on the footprint of both our physical and digital lives.
