Aurora Robson’s Sculptures Emerge Out of Waste

Aurora Robson, a Toronto-born, New York-based multimedia artist, is known for taking discarded materials like plastic bottles, tinted polyacrylic, rivets, and cables and transform them into seemingly organic sculptures. Or as the artist states on her website, Robson’s work focuses on “intercepting the waste stream.”

Works like “Plant Perception,” appears to envelope a massive portion of the second floor of the building it inhabits. Even from the outside of the building, the sculpture’s presence is profoundly felt. “Dyno,” named for a now-defunct plastics manufacturing company, appears less organic than previous works, yet the 2015 piece is the product of two visions: Robson’s and that of her husband, Marshall Coles. The piece was crafted from old, plastic fish waste boxes. The fish-like “Kamilo,” above, for example, consists entirely from plastic marine debris. The artist crafted it in 2011, during a residency at the Parker School in Hawaii. (The debris was cleaned up from Kamilo Point, on the southern tip of Hawaii.)

Robson was the founding artist for the collective Project Vortex, a group of artists, architects, and designers across the world that use plastic debris in their work. At times, Robson’s work directly reflects its origins.