Continental Wasting

We love to travel and wander around and we know it is not good for the planet. We feel bad for every journey we take. We try to minimise our carbon footprint, but can we say this at all when we travel to places we do not have to..

We thought let's do something useful during our travels so we don't feel that bad. Anyway, already for some time we felt the frustration over the damned plastic everywhere you go trying to immerse in the wild. You look at the ground, you dig a hole and the chance you find plastic is very high.

We love working with glass and concrete because we see it as in a way an abbreviation of our planet. From a big big perspective, our planet is a rock travelling in a space. The rock is our world, our safety, our comfort zone. Space is scary and unimaginable. Me and Petra, we don't like the space much, we better stay grounded. The gravity is not just physical thing, it is in our heads, too. Stone projects the safety in the indefinite and undefinable vast space. 

And so the rock, the stone, the beton is made of it, glass is made of it. Even more, glass reminiscent water, how great connection, stone and water and we have a complete picture of Earth basis. Prasklo vases are small representation of our rock planet, a piece of the grounded and grounding energy, and the celebration of how beautiful we find it.

But now when you travel the surface of Earth and if you look closer, something has changed. No more is the rock just a rock. The rock became colourful, sprinkled by plastic fragments. It is everywhere. It sunk to its roots, it melted into its structures, it became part of it. If we want to say our Prasklo vases are pieces of the Earth, we have to include these colourful cheerful almost elements.

The idea had started to actually track the plastic raute from our shops through our hands to the system and inside to structure of the rock planet. So in March 2022, we set on the journey following rivers from European inland where we live, as the plastic waste travels to the ocean. Then we had travelled along the coast witnessing plastic waste cumulated on the beaches and surrounding nature, falling apart into tiny fragments. Because that is when it happens, we clearly saw our Prasklo small stone creations are no more complete. We have to update the mix with an actual composite.

We set up several improvised outdoor working stations as we went and created art objects and vases from traditional Prasklo materials - glass waste and raw concrete. This time however, we used polluted sand to prepare the beton - containing plastic waste elements - plastic bottles, pieces of fishing ropes or small plastic pieces that used be things disposed time ago somewhere in the world, brought by rivers to ocean falling apart, some ending up on beaches and cliffs. So we figured it might have been something we threw to bin in Prague, the wind took it to streets, the rain took it to rivers, and we found it now here. For the glass part, we used locally found glass waste.

We have made special collection and we named it Continental Wasting.

We do not feel better about our carbon footprint but we carry on with the project anytime we travel.

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