Global Ecology senior Ruby Mercer is designing a series of 3D art pieces from recycled materials. Following their completion, she plans to donate one of her creations to PHS to highlight the intersection of beauty and destruction and promote sustainability in our school. 

Mercer was inspired by murals in her elementary school, as well as those done by other artists. She had originally planned to design a bottlecap mural as her main project for her AP 3D Art class. However, since then, she’s decided to instead create an abstract globe sculpture for the course and make the mural as an out-of-school project. Despite the pivot, Mercer still intends to give the mural its permanent home in the Global Hub.

At the beginning of the year, Mercer received a lot of help from her AP 3D Art Teacher, Mr. Cameron Petke. At the beginning of the year, he led Mercer and her peers to brainstorm topics that were personally important to them in order to identify the focus of their projects. Passionate about the environment, Mercer knew early on that she wanted to explore sustainability in her art. 

Additionally, she shared that the class’s mixed materials requirement led her to identify themes of beauty and destruction in the natural world as what she wanted to explore. After a few weeks, she developed her guiding inquiry: 

How can I illustrate the fine line between beauty and destruction with a set of recycled material sculptures?

Because the class requires students to compile a portfolio of their own art creations, she began to experiment with smaller art projects using clay and recycled materials to demonstrate her answer to this question. In an interview with Mercer, she said that this preliminary work has helped her prepare for the main task.

“It’s important to bring in mixed materials, so I was thinking I definitely wanted to do something with plastic and trash,” Mercer stated. “This led me to start thinking about how trash brings destruction, but there’s also beauty in the natural world.”

Mercer has collected and sorted over 260 bottlecaps to use for her projects. In the mural, she will use them to create an image, and for the globe, she will melt them down to build the sculpture.

She has spread the word by asking her friends and members of her cross-country team to give her their used bottlecaps instead of throwing them away. Biology teacher Ms. Katherine Clowe has helped the cause by encouraging Global freshman students to donate their bottlecaps as well.

As soon as the mural is complete, PHS can look forward to viewing Mercer’s creation in the Global Hub as a representation of the beauty in the environment despite the pollution that threatens to taint it.

“Having [this] mural will be a good reminder of what we stand for because, even with all this destruction in the world and all of this plastic, it can still turn into something beautiful,” Mercer said.