Plastic as Contemporary: Synthetic and Durable

Plastic belongs to the present in a way few materials can avoid. It is in the casing of a phone, the lining of a medical package, the surface of a playground, the cable ties behind an exhibition wall and the fragments carried through waterways. Its ubiquity makes it easy to overlook, yet that very familiarity gives plastic a strong artistic charge. It is ordinary, manufactured, resilient and bound to systems of care, consumption and disposal.

In contemporary art, synthetic materials can hold contradictory meanings. Plastic may suggest convenience and contamination, protection and suffocation, childhood and ecological grief. It can imitate skin, glass, stone or bone while remaining unmistakably industrial. Within Alexandra Mawimbi’s wider practice across sculpture, two-dimensional work, video, performance, sound and installation, plastic offers a material language for thinking about representation, mourning and living presence. Its durability becomes both a physical property and an ethical question.

A Material Shaped by the Present

Plastic is often described as artificial, but its cultural history is deeply human. It was developed to replace scarce natural resources, make goods lighter and cheaper, and extend the life of objects. The result is a material that has entered almost every domestic and public environment. Its surfaces are smooth, reflective, translucent, flexible or brittle, allowing an artist to shift quickly between visual seduction and unease.

That tension matters in a studio practice concerned with how bodies and identities are represented. A synthetic surface can resemble flesh without being alive. It can preserve an impression while denying organic change. It can be moulded into a recognisable form, then expose the mechanics of that likeness through seams, joins, folds or industrial repetition.

The phrase “The Plastic as Contemporary: Synthetic and Durable” captures this double condition. Plastic is contemporary because it belongs to the infrastructures of the current moment, but it is durable in a troubling sense: it survives intended use, fashion cycles and even the people who handled it. An artwork using plastic can therefore carry an unusually long temporal horizon, stretching from personal memory to planetary aftermath.

Surface, Simulation and the Question of Presence

The visual power of plastic comes from its ability to simulate. Transparent film can hover like water. A glossy sheet can resemble polished stone. Inflated forms can appear bodily, vulnerable or architectural. Coloured resin can suggest jewels, organs or industrial residue. These visual shifts make the material useful for examining the instability of appearances.

In a gallery, the viewer may first encounter colour, shine or scale before recognising the material’s social history. This delay creates space for reflection. A work might seem precious until its packaging origins become clear, or appear fragile until the viewer notices its resistance to tearing and decay. Such reversals complicate the familiar hierarchy between “high” art materials and everyday manufactured matter.

For audiences in Australia, this relationship between surface and environment can feel especially immediate. A plastic sheet catching the hard light of a Western Sydney afternoon or the glare around St Kilda can evoke building sites, beach shelters, shop awnings and temporary repairs. In Brisbane, heat and humidity alter how synthetic materials look and behave, making gloss, sagging and distortion part of the work’s lived context rather than neutral effects.

Durability, Waste and Care

Durability is frequently treated as a virtue in product design. A container that lasts, a chair that resists weather and a coating that remains intact are marketed as signs of quality. In an artwork, however, long life can become unsettling. The plastic object may outlast a relationship, a home, a species or a public memory. Its endurance turns time into a material that the viewer can feel.

This is where plastic intersects with mourning. A discarded wrapper, fragment of tubing or preserved synthetic flower can become a witness to absence. Unlike organic matter, it refuses to return easily to the earth. It remains available for reactivation, collection and reinterpretation. A work may therefore hold grief in a form that does not dissolve, asking how remembrance can persist without becoming static.

The studio process also brings questions of care into view. Cutting, heating, stitching, layering and fastening plastic require attention to edges, fumes, tension and structural support. Large-scale works demand planning around weight, airflow, storage and installation time. Artists developing expansive sculptural forms may find practical guidance in large-scale art processes, especially when a material’s apparent lightness disguises its logistical demands.

Plastic in Australian Exhibition Spaces

Australian art institutions encounter plastic through several overlapping realities: environmental concern, long-distance transport, a strong craft and design culture, and an audience accustomed to outdoor public art. An installation shown in Melbourne may move through commercial galleries, artist-run spaces and university programs before reaching a regional centre. The work’s meaning can change with each setting, particularly when local viewers bring knowledge of drought, bushfire, flooding or coastal erosion.

The market also shapes how synthetic work is presented. Commercial galleries often need objects to be transportable, documented clearly and suitable for collectors with limited storage. A sculpture made from flexible film may require a precise packing method, while an installation may depend on a detailed re-creation plan. In Australia, freight between Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and smaller regional cities can be expensive, so durability may be valued alongside conceptual significance.

There is a familiar Australian habit of calling materials and situations plainly. A viewer might describe a work as “plasticky”, “built tough” or “a bit eerie” before moving into formal analysis. That directness can be productive. It allows a material to remain connected to ordinary speech, the hardware shop, the servo, the school hall and the shed, rather than being separated from everyday life by specialist language.

A presentation at a place such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, ACCA in Melbourne or a regional institution outside the capital cities also changes the social field around the work. A synthetic sculpture may sit beside collections that privilege bronze, wood, paint or textile, making its industrial origin impossible to ignore. It may also enter conversations about recycling, public procurement and the responsibilities of cultural organisations.

Ways Synthetic Matter Can Carry Meaning

The same material can produce very different emotional and symbolic effects depending on how it is handled. The following qualities can operate together rather than as fixed interpretations:

Material behaviours

Cultural associations

A work can activate these associations without illustrating them directly. A clear membrane stretched across a room may establish a boundary before it becomes a reference to a body or a barrier. A pile of moulded components may suggest industrial repetition while retaining the intimacy of hand assembly. A rough edge can interrupt the material’s manufactured smoothness and expose the labour involved in giving it form.

This is where sculpture and installation become especially significant. Plastic is rarely experienced only as an object; it can alter pathways, reflections, acoustics and the distance between bodies. When joined with sound or performance, its rustle, crackle and vibration become part of the composition. The viewer does not simply look at synthetic matter but moves through a changing sensory situation.

From Personal Trace to Shared Environment

Plastic often carries traces of use: fingerprints, creases, faded colour, compression marks and residue. These signs can create a sense of intimacy even when the object began as a mass-produced commodity. The material becomes a meeting point between anonymous manufacture and individual experience. A bag, film or container may have been made for thousands of people, yet its wear records one particular encounter.

This quality supports an artistic investigation of living presence. Plastic can preserve an outline, contain an imprint or hold a form in suspension, but it cannot reproduce life itself. Its apparent permanence highlights what is missing. In a performance context, a synthetic prop may remain on stage after the performer leaves, functioning as a delayed body or a material remainder.

Video and sound can extend that tension across time. Close footage may reveal microscopic scratches that are invisible in a gallery view. A microphone can amplify the brittle movement of a sheet or the soft friction of layered surfaces. Such documentation is important for an online professional archive because it allows a work to be encountered through image, duration and description while acknowledging that no record fully replaces physical presence.

Australian viewers may connect this material language to the country’s complicated relationship with distance. A work made in one city can be viewed online from Darwin, Hobart or a remote community, while the physical artwork may require days of road freight to arrive. Digital access broadens the audience, yet it also makes the absent object more noticeable. The synthetic surface appears on a screen, removed from its scale, smell, temperature and sound.

A Contemporary Material with a Long Afterlife

Plastic remains compelling because it refuses a single moral position. It is easy to condemn as waste, yet it is also used for lifesaving equipment, accessible design, insulation, storage and protection. An artwork can hold these contradictions without resolving them. It can ask what it means to make a new object from a material already associated with excess, and whether durability is a gift, a burden or both.

The strongest plastic-based works do not rely on the material’s environmental message alone. They attend to form, rhythm, texture, scale and the viewer’s changing position. They make a surface feel bodily, an industrial process feel intimate or an everyday fragment feel historically charged. Through that transformation, plastic becomes more than a sign of pollution. It becomes a way to consider survival, imitation, memory and the boundaries of the human.

For Alexandra Mawimbi’s multidisciplinary archive, synthetic materials can sit productively among sculpture, two-dimensional work, moving image, performance, sound and installation. Their meanings are carried by relationships: between object and body, preservation and disappearance, mass production and hand labour, private grief and shared ecological conditions. Plastic is contemporary because it is embedded in the present, but its real force lies in how it makes the future tangible.

Explore the artist’s works, exhibitions, news and documentation through the portfolio, and spend time with the material details that emerge across different forms. Contact the studio for exhibition enquiries, collaborations or further information about available works and installation requirements.