Artist Beverly Barkat (b. Johannesburg 1962, lives in Jerusalem, Israel) is undertaking her own artistic journey to evoke these vital concerns and the complexity of issues involved. She reimagines planet earth as a massive biosphere made of plastic waste, collected from all over the world. From a distance the earth appears as a veritable reproduction of our living planet: the vast blue oceans, cultivated green lands, golden deserts, the glistening white of Arctic and Antarctic; but from up close we can see that our natural habitat has been turned into a plastic dump by our own doing. 

For over ten months now, Barkat has been collecting plastic from all over the world. She has been doing this together with communities and individuals from various countries across the globe. In her Jerusalem studio she has been classifying it according to type, color, origin, and transforming the myriad-types of plastic into glass-like transparent bricks. For the supporting structure of the biosphere, she has chosen bamboo and metal, out of which she has created a network of meridians and parallels. This organic grid holds a powerful suggestion that the inner support for the dead plastic matter is still a living structure. The artist’s physical interaction with these materials is shaped by her practical methodology and a conceptual strength that serves as a timely and radical call for immediate public action – to save lives as well as our planet.