Plastic Song is a short film featuring the work of British contemporary artist, Steve McPherson who, for the last 25 years, has been picking up pieces of plastic from the beaches of his home town in Margate, Kent and turning them into extraordinary and complex artworks.
The film is the work of filmmaker Julian Hanford, and was shot in and around Margate in 2018/19. It is a moving yet creative look at what is a major pollution issue for our civilisation. The film juxtaposes the care-free holidaymakers of a typical UK summer with McPherson scouring the beaches early morning for discarded plastic rubbish.
“I met Steve at a London art fair a few years ago, and was totally blown away by his work - not just aesthetically, but also the added layer of cultural significance of the way he finds these materials and what he creates with them. In his work, the medium truly is the message, and I knew then that I had to make a film about it. I think Steve’s works are akin to contemporary fossil records of our late civilisation. It would be strange to think of what a distant future culture would make of us if these works were unearthed many centuries hence," Julian Hanford, Clavius Films.
The relentless rise of disposable plastic use in our society is epidemic - when plastic mass-production first took off worldwide in 1950 we produced a mere 2.3 million tons. By 2015 that figure was 448 million tons per annum and rising. Most of this plastic will remain in the environment for 100’s of years. (Source National Geographic).