Artivist Series - 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.
Video conversation with Yustina…click here
What Yustina talks about…
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.
Show Notes
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 Salnikova a 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.