Guinness Record for Creating Largest Recycle Plastic Art - Yustina Salnikova
About Yustina Salnikova
Yustina Salnikova is a designer/sculptor who creates large scale creations meant to encourage environmental awareness and social change. Yustina was instrumental in the creation of Ethyl, an 82-foot-long Blue Whale made from steel and plastic waste. Yustina and her co-designer Joel Stockdill are the current Guinness Record Holders for creating Ethyl, heralded as the World’s largest recycled plastic sculpture.
Turning Plastic Waste Into the World’s Largest Recycled Sculpture
Yustina describes herself as a recycled waste nerd. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the designer/sculptor talks about how she came to design and build large scale creations using recycled plastic waste. In collaboration with Joel Stockdill, she designed Ethyl, an 82-foot-long Blue Whale made from steel and plastic waste. Yustina and Joel Stockdill are Guinness Record Holders for Ethyl who is heralded as the World’s largest recycled plastic sculpture. Yustina shares photographs and explains the work that went into collecting and transforming the recycled plastic into the behemoth Ethyl. Her creations are meant to encourage environmental awareness and social change.
-
Pam Ferris-Olson (00:17): The Women Mind the Water Podcast engages artists in conversation about their work and explores the connection with the ocean. Through these stories, Women Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect the ocean and her creatures. Today, I'm speaking with Yustina Salnikovaa designer and sculptor whose large-scale creations encourage environmental awareness and social change, and transform the public spaces where they are exhibited. Justina was instrumental in the creation of Ethyl, an 82-foot long blue whale made from steel and plastic waste.
Pam Ferris-Olson (00:56): Yustina and her co-designer hold the current Guinness record for creating Ethyl, heralded as the world's largest recycled plastic sculpture. Welcome Yustina, let me start by asking about where you grew up and your journey to becoming an artist. Were you always interested in creating and building?
Yustina Salnikova (01:18): I am originally from Kazakhstan, Almaty, Kazakhstan, which is a country South of Russia, West of China. I was born there and came to the US when I was three. And have been living in different parts of the US, but most of my childhood was in Southern California and I grew up near the ocean there. So a lot of my interests towards the ocean and its living creatures started there. As well as an interest for building and creating and doing art has always persisted through my life. It's been a long journey of learning how to integrate those two; my love for all the creatures in this world, as well as ways to help them in creative ways.
Pam Ferris-Olson (02:16): So which came first, your interest in art or an interest in the environment?
Yustina Salnikova (02:23): That's kind of hard to say. I think they're so intertwined. I think I've always had an interest in both, but didn't realize that I had an interest in both until I was in college actually, when this actually really solidified. I started my Scholastic career post high school, going to City College in Santa Barbara. And there, I actually started my environmental world by writing an English paper, actually, on nuclear waste and its effects on the ocean. From there, I just got really, really passionate and introduced to the world of environmental science and green building and green design, as well as a lot of the social problems that align with a lot of the environmental problems.
Yustina Salnikova (03:21): So I then went on to study at UC Berkeley and got a degree in sustainable environmental design, as well as environmental science policy and management. Through the integration of that, it actually brought me back to art. Art has always been a practice and I've always drawn and sketched and created weird sculptures on my own, since I was a young girl. But through those studies, I actually just realized how impactful a tool like design and the creation of space and art can be, in driving social and environmental change. It kind of solidified for me, after going through those studies, that one of the strongest points of activism I can engage in, and a change driver I could engage in was actually building art and transforming spaces. So that's what led me to that journey.
Pam Ferris-Olson (04:30): Tell me more about your work to promote sustainability. Maybe start by defining sustainability and then how your work draws attention to the plastic waste issue.
Yustina Salnikova (04:41): Sustainability is just continuing our way of life and our health as a species on the planet. But I often ask health for whom and for what, and what are we sustaining. And at this point, I'm actually not interested in sustaining our current way of life and our current paradigm. I'm interested more in using these methods and art as a way of transforming our narratives and transforming our society into more of a, for lack of a better term, a regenerative paradigm or a life where we, as animals on this planet, are giving back to all of the beings that help us live our lives; the plants, the ocean. Instead of just sustaining off of it, to actually be able to live in relationship and be able to give back to it as well.
Pam Ferris-Olson (05:39): I'd like to know more about your collaboration with Joel Stockdill. How did that collaboration come about? Do the ideas precede the collection of the waste or do they grow from the collection?
Yustina Salnikova (05:52): Joel has been making large scale art for 12 years now on many levels, and has been working with reclaimed materials. I was really interested on using reclaimed materials and different materialities to create space and structures, as well as using those structures to create environmental functions within the world. So sculpture that collects water, or sculpture that teaches or has education. And we really connected on those two points, and we started working together. I first started working with him as an apprentice and learning the way he was using the trades to do that. So he's trained in carpentry and metal work. At first I was working with him to develop some of those skills and to solidify my own knowledge on building large scale structures and sculpture.
Yustina Salnikova (06:56): And then after a year of working together in that way, we started collaborating and working on concepts together. And yeah, the biggest and the first big realization of that was Ethyl, the blue whale. But we've both been kind of scavengers and waste nerds for a long time.
Pam Ferris-Olson (07:24): Please describe how the waste is collected, sorted and then treated in order to be used in the construction of the piece.
Yustina Salnikova (07:34): It really depends on the material we're working with and where we are building the piece. And what the process actually looks like. Each sculpture is very, very unique. And for a while we were working on the road, so we would actually go to a community and get to know the community and get to know the waste stream in that particular place. And gather materials in that area and see what's most available. So let's say like a place has a lot of recycled lumber or plastic or whatnot, and we'd make relationships with a lot of the waste carriers in that space or those salvage yards or whatnot. And we would then collect the material and we sort it. Sort it according to type and size and shape and color and all of the things. And then from there, develop a palette to work with for the sculpture itself.
Yustina Salnikova (08:41): So it really depends. When we do work with plastic, depending on the process of plastic recycling we engage in, it's a little bit different, because we do two different types of plastic sculpture. We do assemblage type sculpture, which is more like collage and putting things together, as well as fully recycling the material itself, which you would see is what we did for Ethyl the Whale is where we actually created new material from material. So that comes with a way more intensive sorting process and cleaning process. But yeah, we usually get all the raw material, sort it, clean it, then cut it into the shapes we want it and then sculpt with it.
Pam Ferris-Olson (09:29): Would you describe the process of envisioning and creating Ethyl? For example, how did you collect all the plastic needed for a life-size blue whale? How did you assemble her? What other challenges did you face in bringing her to reality. Please, when you're discussing visual aspects of the process, describe them for anyone listening to an audio only version.
Yustina Salnikova (09:56): Yeah, so Ethyl was a project that really exceeded the scope and scale that we had ever done before at the time. She was an amazing learning process. Our main inspiration for her was John from what's known as the Precious Plastics Movement, which is actually a group that was started in Europe, in the Netherlands, I believe. And has created open source DIY technology to recycle your own plastic. They've basically taught people how to recycle plastic and created machinery as well as tutorials. And people have been starting these DIY recycling centers around the world.
Yustina Salnikova (10:44): So at the time when we got the commission of Ethyl, Ethyl was commissioned by the Monterey Bay Aquarium originally. And it was a campaign to raise awareness around plastic waste, specifically. The idea came from the fact that about 300,000 pounds of plastic waste enter the ocean every nine minutes. So we wanted to take that statistic and actually visualize it. And so hence we brought forth the whale as, the mass of a whale is what goes into the ocean every nine minutes. So from that concept, we were basically tasked with creating a whale that illustrated that. We took that opportunity to try out and to engage the Precious Plastics model of DIY recycling.
Yustina Salnikova (11:44): It was a very interesting process. We wanted to do a series of community engagements, which often is how we collect our plastic. But for this one, we needed a lot, a lot of plastic waste. We used about 5,000 pounds of plastic trash. So we actually worked with the local municipalities. We worked with Green Waste in the Bay area primarily. And they donated a lot of the plastic waste. At the time we were collecting waste was shortly after the National Sword policy had been passed, meaning that China was no longer accepting any of our plastic waste. So the value of a barrel of plastic had significantly decreased. So recyclers were more than willing to donate plastic waste to this whale.
Yustina Salnikova (12:48): So we picked up many bales of plastic as well as got a couple thousand pounds delivered to our warehouse. And from there, we would have to sort every single piece and go through, because the way plastic recycling works, you can only really recycle one type of plastic with another type of the same kind. So for the whale, we decided, after doing some research, we did high density polyethylene because at the time, it was the easiest plastic to work with, with the methods that we had. As well as one of the safest to work with, because it does not off gas at its melting temperature. We were considering all these things, so we decided to work with number two plastic.
Yustina Salnikova (13:48): So we would get a bunch of barrels of what was supposedly pre-sorted, number two, high density polyethylene. And we would have to go through all of the piles and hand sort them and look through each individual piece and find the label on the piece of waste, to ensure that it's number two plastic. Because if you add a different type of plastic to the recycling process, it creates an impurity in the end product. So we have these end products here. This is one of the whale panels. So if you actually have a different type of plastic in here, it creates a weakness. And we didn't want that, because our primary concern with building the whale is we wanted to build a sculpture out of plastic that wouldn't add to any pollution, or there was less chance of any plastic pieces breaking off and then ending up in the ocean or in the environment somewhere.
Yustina Salnikova (14:51): So we thought if you have a solid consolidated piece, that's melted together, it's much safer in the long run. That was part of our motivation. So yeah, we would have to sort all of them and then we would wash all of the pieces, because you have to make sure that each piece doesn't have any of the products still on it. So like a milk jug, we have to rinse out all the crusty milk. And we mostly use like, number two is milk jugs and laundry detergent bottles. Those are some of the main things, what comes in number two plastic.
Yustina Salnikova (15:32): So we went through a whole washing process, which we actually created a gray water filtration system to filter all of our water. So we could actually recycle water and dispose of it safely after all of the washing processes. After it's washed, it has to de-labeled and all of the labels and any extra impurities have to be cut off. And then it goes into a shredder and then all of the plastic is shredded into granular pieces. And then it is melted and compressed and it makes one of these panels. After that, we put them all together and made the whale. The whale framework and the way the paneling went on itself was all built to flat pack and designed to flat pack. So we could actually fit the whole whale on, in a 50-foot truck and pack it down. So it's made to move.
Yustina Salnikova (16:37): So we actually built it on-site at our warehouse, and then we just disassembled it, brought it to Crissy Field and then reassembled it there. And then, a few months later... It was only on Crissy Field for, I think, six months, total. And now it's in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the community college there. And we, again, flat packed it after that, shipped it to New Mexico and reassembled it there. So it's actually, for being such a large scale piece, it's very moveable.
Pam Ferris-Olson (17:07): How long did it take to build Ethyl, and how many people were involved?
Yustina Salnikova (17:12): It took a total of about six months to build Ethyl, and it was a very rushed six months. And it took a total of, almost 100 people came through. It was me and Joel leading the team. And we were working with our arts and management consulting firm, Building 180, who helps us with all of the logistics and all of that good stuff. And then we had a core team of about 10 people that worked with us every day. And then we had people come in and out, to volunteer days. We had lots of community engagement volunteer days that taught people about plastic and plastic recycling, and turned it into workshop days. So probably about 100 people total with the rotating crew, because we had to have a lot of people rotating through the six months. So yeah, a lot of hands and a lot of love went into Ethyl and her creation.
Pam Ferris-Olson (18:24): How is your art an expression of you as a person and your view of the world?
Yustina Salnikova (18:29): For me, it's really about a conversation with the material and with the earth itself through this work. I think it brings me closer to being in relationship with all of these things. And I think it expresses my view of the world, and the way I see that, in a lot of the world, we're fighting narratives between what's right and wrong, and how do we create systems that allow us to live in a good way on this planet. And I see our material world and our spatial world as an expression of our ideologies, our cities and everything that we've built is just an expression of what we believe and what we want to have in the world.
Yustina Salnikova (19:33): I use art and creation and space making as that, that change agent. I think that sometimes fighting ideology with ideology becomes tricky and sticky, and often, that we need to touch deeper parts of our soul because that's what we're actually striving for. So for me, art is an expression of that. It's my way of being an activist and being engaged in a different way, than maybe some of the more traditional ways of being.
Pam Ferris-Olson (20:15): As an artist, how does your work engage people in caring about the ocean?
Yustina Salnikova (20:22): I think whenever you see an animal made out of recycled waste, or especially we've been creating a lot of sea animals out of plastic waste, I think it reminds people of the impact they have on the ocean and the greater environment in their day-to-day lives. Especially when you're looking at Ethyl, for me, I see all of the things I've used in those panels, even if they're jumbled up, but even learning about the piece, you see all of the waste that you've produced in your life as a consumer, as a person.
Pam Ferris-Olson (21:01): I have been speaking with Yustina Salnikova for the Women Mind the Water podcast series. This series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com. An audio only version of this podcast is available on the Women Mind the Water website, and on iTunes. This is Pam Ferris-Olson. Thank you for listening.
Rose McAdoo (00:42): I didn't grow up in a family of artists or bakers in the sense that that was part of our every day. My grandma was a great painter, but I didn't know her super well. My mom's a photographer. My sister kind of got, what I thought she got, the art genes, and I was a bit more social, but it's been fun to discover art through the form of cake. It's been a really nice transition.
Pam Ferris-Olson (01:09): So Rose, what is your formal training and how did you come to transform cakes into political statements?
Rose McAdoo (01:16): I love school. I love college. It's just never been something in my financial wheelhouse. I've been financially independent for all of my adult life and that intermediate period until I became an adult, and so I have no formal training whatsoever. I got a lot of on-the-job training, which was awesome. It's such a great alternative to going to school, although I'm trying to go back to school now. But on-the-job training is such a powerful way of learning. You gain so many connections. You're learning in real-world time and real-world skills, and you're making money instead of paying money, so it all ended up working out. I landed an awesome group of mentors, specifically when I was working at Nine Cakes, which is a phenomenal cake shop that's located in Brooklyn, New York. Betsy Thorleifson is the owner of that company. She was my end-all, be-all person that I wanted to work for, and I got to be her right hand for four years, which was amazing. And she's still a huge mentor of mine and really showed me how to sculpt cakes, how to build whatever you want, and just really inspired me. And she has a really diverse career background as well. And so as I was feeling less fulfilled by the more traditional wedding route, she was really a huge encourager as I wanted to use cakes to start telling stories of migration and the refugee plight. And she was wonderful in donating her kitchen space to my creative baking endeavors and just a huge support as I left her company to work in Antarctica, and all of these things. I feel really lucky that I landed that.
Pam Ferris-Olson (03:11): Oh my goodness, you told me so many things. I want to ask you a million questions, but let's focus... You went to work in a bakery and you ended up in Antarctica.
Rose McAdoo (03:24): I did.
Pam Ferris-Olson (03:25): How did that happen?
Rose McAdoo (03:26): Yeah, it was a long career path of working in patisseries. I was the head chef and catering director of a restaurant at 23, which I had no business doing, but was an awesome learning experience. And then ran a chocolate factory in Brooklyn and then got the job at the cake shop, and it was just food production and kitchen management in every capacity. I was like, "I'm not going to leave New York for something unless it's a larger adventure," which is I think pretty hard to find. And so when I got the opportunity to be one of the sous chefs down at Antarctica's McMurdo Station, obviously, you have to take an opportunity like that. So I headed down to Antarctica. For the first time in 2019, and I've since done three full seasons there, two summers, and then I just finished a long winter season, which was amazing. Yeah, so there was no positions open on the bakery side in Antarctica, and so I was running the savory kitchen. I was the sous chef, or one of a team of four sous chefs for McMurdo Station's savory kitchen, producing breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight meals for up to 1100 scientists and support staff at that research station. That was my first season.
And then when I returned the second time, I got to be in a sous chef for LDB, which is NASA's Long Duration Balloon atmospheric research camp. So I still lived on the main station for that camp. It's kind of a best of both worlds. You get the social aspects of being on the main station, but I still got to commute out to camp every day where we had a secondary facility and I was doing savory and sweet there. Was a sous chef and then I had my supervisor, but it was just the two of us running camp food production. And so then when I spent the winter down in Antarctica, I stayed and extended. There were no kitchen positions available and I made a bizarre transition into hazardous waste management, and so spent the winter just learning an entirely different career path. It was an amazing learning experience as far as how we manage and transfer our waste, because all the waste tests leave the continent by ship. And so I was forklifting around old fuel and oil, and processing chemicals from the Crary Science Lab as well.
Pam Ferris-Olson (06:09): All right, so let's rope you back in a little bit and ask how it came to be that you decided to transform cakes to make environmental statements.
Rose McAdoo (06:21): My first season in the Antarctica I was heading to a lot of the science lectures there and my brain just formats anything that I learned about into cake. And so I was seeing data sets as tiered cakes and seeing the ice sheets as big cracks of fondant. And so when I left the ice, I wanted to design a balanced collection of Antarctic cakes. Started balancing the collection as far as different colors and stories and shapes, and put together seven cakes that I'm really proud of that spanned everything from biology to space sciences to logistics of how we get materials. But a big part of that process is just investing firsthand into learning and being in different places, and meeting different people and caring about what they care about.
Pam Ferris-Olson (07:19): What is your process for choosing a cause, designing the cake and then actually creating the cake?
Rose McAdoo (07:26): My process, I mean, whatever I fall in love with the most is what I want to share with people, and so it's very, very firsthand-experience based. And it's really important for me to be invested in the places and the people and the stories that I want to be sharing about. And so while it would be much easier for me to just have a cake studio and make cakes there, it's important to me to try and make these cakes in different locations and with the help of different people when that's possible. I take a lot of notes, I do a lot of research and ask a lot of questions to the scientists, for example, that I want to share the work of. And I've done a lot of cross-collaborative research on data science and how to visually share information. There are so many people who are really good at that, and so I'm able to kind of use their techniques to figure out how to do that in an edible form with cake. And so once I have the design setup, then it's just baking and covering in fondant. Yeah, sculpting and painting.
Pam Ferris-Olson (08:42): Okay. Can you discuss one of your ocean-inspired cakes and describe it for those who are listening to an audio-only version of this podcast?
Rose McAdoo (08:51): Absolutely. My favorite ocean-inspired cake is the Icebreaker Cake. It's kind of my pièce de résistance. It's very Antarctic looking. And it's a four... Actually, it's a five-tier cake. The bottom tier is completely white, the top tier is dark, dark blue, and the tiers in between are gradual breaking a part of that ice shelf. And so you move away from that stark white at the bottom. All the pieces start to crack and you get this really fractured-appearing transition up to that top tier. And then I created a little red boat, and it's super tiny on the cake. I think it's still disproportionately large, but it was necessary to make it about an inch and a half long. And that is the Polar Star, which is our icebreaker vessel that comes in so that we're able to use the ocean for logistics and transportation to support a science research station.
Pam Ferris-Olson (09:53): How are your cakes in expression of who you are as a person and your view of the world?
Rose McAdoo (09:59): My cakes are curious, as am I, and they run a really broad scope of subjects. I think there's a humility to them and that's not me saying, "Oh, look, I'm so humble." But a humility of knowledge I think is really important and a humility of how much you understand about the world. I'm a pastry chef. I don't know the first thing about space sciences or ocean systems, or what else, a seal colony is. I know nothing about that. And so being able to bring my art with the sense of humility, where I can ask the stupid questions that actually make sense and start to make these things relatable. I really believe that people only care about what they know about and that a lot of the world's discrepancies can be shifted with a one-on-one connection. And so if I'm able to live my life in this maybe bizarre way where I'm moving around a lot and making cakes in Antarctica or making cakes in prison or wherever, I think that that will connect more and more people. "Oh, I know someone who went to Antarctica. Now I'm more interested in Antarctic climate or seal research that's happening, or scientific practices as a whole." I think you have to share those stories and you have to hit on different things that maybe confuse people a little bit, and I think that that's where you end up grabbing people's attention.
Pam Ferris-Olson (11:47): What's next for you?
Rose McAdoo (11:50): I'm waiting on a couple artist-in-residency applications that I submitted. COVID's been really great for staying at home and applying to things, which is just a blessing in disguise. And I'm putting together a collection of, for lack of a better name, just really weird cakes. And so showing kind of the discrepancy in disproportionate data sets, where you maybe have a huge bottom tier and then a little tiny tier on top that shows temperature variables or biological diversity loss. Cakes that really make no sense size wise. And I think that that'll be a really fun visual for people, so I'm working on putting together a collection of weird data cakes.
Pam Ferris-Olson (12:39): Thank you, Rose, for sharing. This has been a lot of fun.
Rose McAdoo (12:42): Thank you so much, Pam. I'm really happy to be here.
Pam Ferris-Olson (12:45): I have been speaking with Rose McAdoo of Whisk Me Awake Cakes in Brooklyn, New York for the Women Mind the Water Podcast Series. The series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com. An audio version of this podcast is available on the Woman Mind the Water website and on iTunes, the name Women Mind the Water and the associated logo along with Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson. Thank you for listening.
