Waves of Bottles
רוח ים  Ruach Yam - Sea Breeze Festival
Artist colony on the beach
Bat Yam, Israel August 2011

Using 303 discarded Coca-Cola bottles and a variety of bottle caps, I created a 3d interpretation of the festival's wave logo.

The idea of the artist colony was for groups of artists to come together for a week at a time to create art on the beach primarily using discarded materials.  The festival had 6 different groups of artists and students each spending a week making art.  I had participated in the first week as part of a collaborative installation entitled 'to the Sea in Ships' with Joseph Connelly as Gordon & Gordon Art.

The festival provided materials - including thousands of discarded bottles.  There were so many bottles that I was able to make the installation entirely from Coca-Cola bottles.  Most of the bottles didn't have caps, but luckily I had been collecting them from the streets of Jerusalem where they were quite plentiful.  There was an extra benefit to having collected the caps in that I had a variety of colors and sizes and was able to create a design of color inside the installation.

It took me 2 full days to cut up all of the bottles.  A lot of them had glue on them from a previous art project.  Then I made a frame for two sides of the installation using wood from an old packing crate.  I painted it a fun beach color.  I tried a few different things to attach the pieces together and finally settled on cut up bottles screwed into both sides of each board.  It worked well, especially once I settled the frame into the sand and there wasn't much torque involved.  I loved the idea of using the bottles for this.

Installing the waves took about 8 hours.  Each wave is 1 meter in diameter.  I had a piece of string that I used to mark the half-circles - making one mark for the outer wave and one mark for the inner wave.  The top of the bottles made the outer wave, the bottom half of the bottles made the middle wave, and the caps made the inner wave.  Since the winds could be pretty strong, I pushed the bottles into the sand about 6cm.

The installation might have gone a bit quicker, except that there was a big concert on the beach that night and as I was installing the piece there were throngs of adults and children who were coming through the area.  The kids thought it looked like a lot of fun and wanted to participate.  Some really got in on the idea of finding bottle caps around the beach and bringing them to me - which was totally great.

I was really interested in how the light would play off of the bottles as the sun changed position and I wasn't disappointed.  The shadows changed throughout the day and the colors also.  Sometimes it was blinding to look at the bottles and all you could do was look at the caps.  Other times the bottles commanded the attention and you had to look hard to see the caps.