Almost exactly a year ago, I came into possession of several bagfuls of discarded lobster rope (or "pot warp") while attending Courtney Puckett's fibers workshop at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. During that workshop, I became really interested in exploring not only the material but the idea of crafting new lives for that material. Utility, disposal, display, repeat...
In this post, I will attempt to chronicle the journey that the rope and I have been on for the past year.
But first, let's take it back to the beginning...
1: Oil
I believe most of the rope I have is mono-filament polypropylene rope, which is popular in fishing applications due to its strength and water resistance. Polypropylene is made from either natural gas or, more often, crude oil, which is refined into propylene through fractionation or other methods. The petrochemical feedstock used to make my rope may have made up some of the ~12 million barrels per day, roughly 12% of oil demand in 2017.
Of course, the story goes back much further than when that oil was pulled out of the ground: my rope, like all petroleum products, is ghost soup made from marine organisms that lived millions of years ago.
2: Rope
The polypropylene was made into rope, packaged, and sold, and somehow found its way to Deer Isle, Maine. Presumably it was used for hauling and securing lobster pots in fishing operations -- servants to the 400 year old, $1 billion Maine lobstering tradition.
3: Transfer Station
Polypropylene breaks down in UV light, and lobsterman need to change out their stock regularly. The summer that I was in Maine, they were also dealing with new federal regulations aimed at reducing harm to whales which required them to halve their number of vertical lines. This meant that when I arrived at the Deer Isle Transfer Station (the transfer station folks granted very generous access to students and faculty from Haystack, mostly non-Mainers eager to sort through some local flotsam), I found a pile of rope above my waist.
Note: At least anecdotally, it's pretty common for lobstermen to burn their old rope, a holdover from when natural fiber ropes were used.
4: Installation
I spent several days just washing the rope. Several rounds of soaking in Synthrapol, rinsing out over a slop sink, drying in the sun. Then hours and hours of unwinding from the thick triple-twisted rope into 3 thinner, more flexible strands - permanently wavy from years in the twisted form. Untwisting my was a full body experience. I stretched the ropes across the deck, sometimes fifty feet, and spun my body around them rather than carry the coiled ends around themselves. It was a long and monotonous process, but I loved doing it on a sunny deck. Then, the washing cycle repeated.
The "Nest" installation was supposed to be a swinging seat. In the video below, showing my installation process, you can see me test the weight a few times at the beginning and decide that I was not confident the posts could hold a person. I've always loved playing with the way that fiber organically fills a fixed frame, so I just allowed "Nest" to occupy the space.
Afterward, I pulled it all down, washed it again, and drove it back to New York. I used some of it again this spring, for this installation in my living room which I just called "The Quarantine Piece".
5: Basket
I knew as soon as I took them from the transfer station that I eventually wanted to return the materials to utility. After some experimentation and thought, I landed on baskets.
Basket making is one of the most universal human endeavors. The story of basketry stretches back 20,000 years and touches every part of the world. Ancient people needed baskets (all of them), and developed basket-making processes that took advantage of the materials around them: palms in the tropics, grass in the savanna, and roots and stalks in cold temperate zones. In the Anthropocene, we have plastic waste.
This is a good place to note that the cotton rope basket style, which I loosely adapted for these polypropylene rope baskets, has some similarities to coil baskets made by many different indigenous groups including Navajo, Hopi, and Papago artists in the American Southwest. Most Native American basket artists secure the layers through wrapping and cover the main rope with really incredible patterns, while these baskets leave the rope exposed and simply sew the layers of rope together. This website is a resource for information about indigenous basketry artists. Coiling is also used in basket-making in some regions of Africa.
My basketry process involves one more layer of processing post-de-installation: Since most of my rope is mono-filament-based, I've unraveled a few short ropes into individual strands to use as thread the place of an additional material.
My baskets are funky and strange and I usually have no idea how big or what shape they will be until I'm pretty far into them. I like playing with "families" of baskets, born from strands of the same rope, and leaning into the kinks and flaws they carry from their previous lives. This is just the beginning of the basket journey, as I've got plenty of rope left to go. I'd like to eventually make some larger vessels as well, and maybe even explore this form-making in larger scale sculpture.
End of Life
The unfortunate answer is that I do not know what the end of life will look like for these ropes. I hope to use these baskets for a long time, and that the people I then give them to will also use them for a long time. They could be disassembled, although not super easily - it would require methodically pulling the monofilament thread back out the way it came or snipping it in between each layer. This is a departure from the vessels I normally make, which are knitted or crocheted and therefore come with free self-destruct buttons (pulling out the last loop).
Polypropylene can be recycled, but currently only about 1% of it is. The rest goes to landfill, where it releases dioxins and vinyl chloride over 20-30 years, or into the ocean where it breaks down into smaller and smaller but still poisonous pieces. I'll do what I can to find a responsible end of life plan, but it is unrealistic to think that recycling/upcycling/creative reuse solutions could possibly keep up with the rate of production, let alone deal with the past 50 years of plastic production. The story of this rope, as rope or baskets or particles our water or toxins in the air, will probably outlast us all.
For an artist working with similar materials, check out Orly Grenger.
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