Give and take

Sarah Richards' artist statement for the exhibition Rooftop VII - ' The Inner child':

"I have been concerned about the piles of plastic I use each day in my kitchen. So I thought I would make sculptures with it as well as using other recycled commercially produced plastic (used to make benches etc.). It has not been easy. Plastic is a moody material and unpredictable; each type of plastic reacting differently to heat. So this becomes my time of play! I can't control the medium as I am used to with wax.

In creating these works I realised that the only way to rid our planet of plastic s not to use it or even better not to create it in the first place. It is very toxic; plumes of smoke drifted into the atmosphere as I worked, and the dust from the grindings go everywhere. In essence, my 'recycling' was not helping the issue.

So although these sculptures were a fun experiment, creating them brought home the realisation that there may well be nothing left of natural value for the children of the future, just  plastic and other 'things' all created from products extracted from eath, destroying what is naturally beautiful and amazingly created."