Reenie Charriere

During my residency in Messejana, Portugal, I have been continuing my experimentations with discarded materials including plastics bags and packaging, broken walls, rust, and fallen debris.

I worked on 3 different kinds of pieces.

Warp and Weave is an unfolding tapestry still in progress, made from melted white plastic packing materials that held large aluminum siding sections. My piece was composed of woven sections that become warped and irregular as I melt each piece. I have also drawn on them with black paint markers. The unpredictability also reminds me of many of the ruined structures I’ve seen in Messejana.

If Walls Could Talk was a temporary site-specific piece I developed. I collaborated with crumbling walls by putting plastic-covered stones where there are gaps from stones falling out, and to me this piece was a way of really looking closely at decay and also putting the colors of our contemporary pollution for people to wonder and perhaps take a closer look at all of the plastic bits that end up on the side of roads and in our waterways.

Rust was a series of explorations with rusted metal I have collected in Messejana by a 16th-century monastery in ruins. I have started to make prints of these findings. I have also made assemblages with rust frameworks and collected plastic bags and packaging materials.