John Healey: There’s a Great Future in Plastics

Discarded items of convenience document the poisoning of our environment and ultimately ourselves.

With the precision of a gentle archaeologist, Ottawa-based artist John Healey quietly began a collection of plastic objects found along the rocky shores of the St Lawrence Seaway.

He took his findings home, photographed them, and examined everything, trying to understand the mystery of each object; what it is, who threw it away, and why it was there in the first place. But these questions can be nearly impossible to answer. So why are Healey’s images so captivating, and feel like they are more than a simple reminder of our wasteful habits? What can his project Plastic Beach add to the complicated conversation that surrounds responsibility and legacy of plastics in Canada?