Can we use Neptune balls to open a difficult discussion around the material impacts of artworks made from plastics? The degradation of plastics, even under ideal conditions, is still not well understood, and as increasing numbers of artists use them and similar synthetic materials in their artworks, museums and galleries face new challenges as they strive to protect and preserve a wide range of products that break down in different ways. The longevity of plastics (increasingly made visible by their presence as waste and \u201cmatter out of place\u201d in natural environments) and their refusal to biodegrade and return to the earth are well known. But another side of plastics is often obscured: their fragility and inability to maintain a state of pristine wholeness. Their induction period (during which no material change is noticeable) is followed by inevitable and irreversible degradation\u2014often extremely rapid, change is typically visible in less than thirty years, but with some newer or experimental synthetic polymers the induction period can be mere months.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Yvonne Shashoua, Conservation of Plastics: Materials Science, Degradation and Preservation<\/em> (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2008), 9.<\/span> Their sometimes blisteringly fast and spectacular breakdown is largely at odds with the way in which -material-based artworks are understood to endure.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n To date, outside of conservation approaches aimed at slowing down inevitable degradation and making repairs where possible, there has been little discussion of how to understand the lifespan of synthetic materials in artworks. Perhaps work in the conservation field on time-based ephemeral media presents opportunities to care for works through what archivist Katrina Windon calls \u201can ethics of letting go\u201d and an approach that values the materiality of artworks as temporal and relentlessly changing. Works of performance art, for example, are often seen to be situational and embodied, separate from the \u201cdocumentary surrogates\u201d that are used to memorialize them in archives.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Katrina Windon, \u201cThe Right to Decay with Dignity: Documentation and the Negotiation between an Artist\u2019s Sanction and the Cultural Interest,\u201d Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America<\/em> 31,no. 2 (September 2012): 143.<\/span> Innovative approaches to accessioning instructions or recipes, or recording memories of the experience of the artwork rather than the work itself, might also provide inspiration. The issue here is that works of art made of plastic are unruly but material. As feminist scholar of synthetic materials Heather Davis notes, plastics refuse to let go.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Heather Davis, Plastic Matter<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 105.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Depending on the perspective, plastics could be seen to undermine the focus of Western museums on permanence. However, as plasticizers migrate to the surface of artworks through lively and irreversible processes of microcrazing, blooming, chalking, embrittlement, crumbling, pitting, discolouring, shrinking, and sweating, they bring their toxic legacies with them, transferring them from the object to the surrounding environment. Neptune balls allow us to think through this quandary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The images included in this article are of Neptune balls collected at Grand Bend Beach, on the shore of Lake Huron in Ontario, on the last stop of a day-long field trip organized by Friederike Landau-Donnelly and Kirsty Robertson (co-author of this article) for the Centre for Sustainable Curating (CSC). The field trip included stops at the Oil Museum of Canada in Oil Springs and the sprawling refineries of Canada\u2019s Chemical Valley in Sarnia, before ending on the kilometres-long stretch of sand making up Grand Bend Beach. Each stop on the itinerary was linked to a different moment in the \u201clife-cycle\u201d of the plastics industry: the extraction of resources from the land, the transformation of value through processing and manufacturing, and the waste or after-lives of said processes. The region around Sarnia is the epicentre of plastics manufacturing in Canada; a recent study by the art-science collaboration the Synthetic Collective counted more than twenty-five hundred facilities devoted to this purpose in the relatively small area.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Kirsty Robertson et al.\/Synthetic Collective, \u201cPlastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through,\u201d Open Library of the Humanities Journal<\/em> 9, no. 2 (2023), accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Finishing our field trip on a sandy beach, under a blue sky dotted with clouds, the pounding waves of the inland sea of Lake Huron seemed far removed from Chemical Valley, though we were only forty minutes away by bus. Reminders, however, were everywhere. Nurdles (pre-consumer plastic pellets) dotted the beach, along with fragments and strings of colourful post-consumer microplastics. Dune grasses swayed in the wind, and the Neptune balls revealed themselves, clustering in areas of the beach where they moved back and forth, back and forth, and will do so for years, gathering increasing amounts of detritus as they roll. The Neptune balls were legible as dense little narratives of entanglement, refusing to be separate from the processes of their making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The samples gathered on the field trip served as contributions to the exhibition Curating Waste<\/em> (2022), curated by Landau-Donnelly and Robertson and presented at the Cohen Commons Gallery, Western University. The decision to include a display of Neptune balls was prompted by their valuable function as thought-provoking objects. They enabled the broader group of scholars and students to think through how to include anthropogenic waste in contemporary art exhibitions, raising questions about the fate of these materials after their public presentation.11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - The full title of the exhibition was Curating Waste:<\/em> Ist Das Kunst Oder Kann Das Weg? <\/em>(Is It Art Or Is It Trash?), a project that focused on flows of water and waste in Canada and the Netherlands. This exhibition was funded by the Radboud-Western Collaboration Fund. More information can be found on The Centre for Sustainable Curating website, accessible online.<\/span> These found objects are temporally confounding; although the grasses will decay rapidly, some of the plastic fragments buried in their packed interiors will conceivably last for thousands of years in an increasingly deteriorating condition. As part of the exhibition, the CSC attempted to remediate the Neptune balls, separating the plastics from grasses and natural materials that would be returned to the shores of Lake Huron. A slow-paced video captures the act of carefully detangling four of the clusters. The process is one of endurance and care. The removed plastic threads pile up in a colourful heap, but as the balls are unravelled it quickly becomes clear that failure is inevitable. The task proves impossible; although the newer, lightly entangled clusters might be picked apart, in the older and more densely packed clusters the natural and synthetic elements cannot be separated. As the video shows, the intervention results not in repair but in proliferation, as both the dried grasses and the disintegrating plastics dissolve into dust, creating an atmospheric m\u00e9lange of plastic and organic materials.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Many of the Neptune Balls gathered as a part of the field trip were returned intact to the shorelines of Lake Huron with as much accessible synthetic material as possible removed. Ultimately, it was felt that the grass entanglements belonged to the lake, while the synthetic materials could stay at the CSC.<\/span> What can this dust tell us? All matter, whether natural or synthetic, has a life cycle. But plastics have a particular relation to time that is boldly confounding for the lifespan of artworks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Writing in 2008, plastics conservator Yvonne Shashoua noted that at the end of the twentieth century, the conservation world was characterized by both a widespread denial of the presence of plastics in museum collections and a lack of understanding of their inherent vice and instability.13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Shashoua, Conservation of Plastics<\/em>, 8.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Although attitudes have changed and conservation knowledge has grown, the sheer quantity and scope of synthetic materials in collections, alongside the experimental pairing and mixing of media in many artworks, are deeply challenging to museums, the role of which Rubio refers to as a machine that makes elusive permanence (appear to be) possible.14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - Rubio, Still Life, <\/em>17.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The crumbling Neptune balls, which have been rolling around in a harsh environment for years, or possibly decades, allow us to see time unravelling. At what point does change become degradation? Writing about the removal of dirt from paintings, Rubio asks where the dirt ends and the art begins. But with plastics, which cross almost all porous boundaries, melding together bodies and environments, transferring the gallery atmosphere into the bodies of visitors, proliferating and spreading, this question is even more complex. Skirting the line between art and not-art, the impossibility of remediating the Neptune balls and of returning them to their originating environment tethers the artworld to what Murphy calls \u201calterlife,\u201d a living with chemical intimacies that is interwoven with the threads of industry, pollution, land, and water.15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 15 <\/a> - Michelle Murphy, \u201cAlterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations,\u201d Cultural Anthropology<\/em> 32, no. 4 (November 2017): 494\u2013503.<\/span> The proliferating plastic cleaves to other materials and environments, warping time outside the museum and within.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Toronto-based curator and author Katie Lawson has organized exhibitions at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Images Festival, and the Toronto Biennial of Art. She is currently working toward a PhD in art and visual culture at Western University and is an active member of the Centre for Sustainable Curating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Canada Research Chair in Museums, Art, and Sustainability and a professor of museum and curatorial studies at Western University, Kirsty Robertson directs the Centre for Sustainable Curating and is a founding member of the Synthetic Collective, an art-science collaboration.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"Lawson&Robertson\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_LawsonRobertson_KirstyObjects_6-C-FLAT-scaled.jpg\")
Photo: Bruno Sinder<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Lawson&Robertson\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_LawsonRobertson_neptuneBalls_Frame_19-30.jpg\")
We Could Live For a Thousand Years<\/em>, video still, 2022.
Filmed by Jennifer Martin.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Lawson&Robertson\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_LawsonRobertson_neptuneBalls_Frame_19-16.jpg\")
We Could Live For a Thousand Years<\/em>, video still, 2022.
Filmed by Jennifer Martin.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
In 1957, when Roland Barthes wrote his now well-known text on plastic, he called it an \u201calchemical\u201d material that contained within it \u201cthe very idea of its infinite transformation,\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Roland Barthes, \u201cPlastic,\u201d in Mythologies<\/em>, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Vintage, 2000), 98 (original French edition 1957).<\/span> and celebrated it for its potential to mimic and surpass other materials and to be shaped into virtually anything. Barthes described the flexible forms of plastic as \u201cthe trace of a movement,\u201d a poetic phrasing that is remarkably at odds with what was experienced during the field trip: the linear structure of the refineries, the benzene odour that permeated the bus as it drove by without stopping, the ominous plumes floating overhead, the flares burning off excess gas in often irresponsible ways that deeply and constantly impact the nearby Aamjiwnaang First Nation in a pattern repeated in many other Indigenous communities that are sacrifice zones for extractive industries.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - See The Land and the Refinery website, an Indigenous-led community resource dedicated to Canada\u2019s Chemical Valley, created by the Indigenous Environmental Data Justice Lab in the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto, accessible online.<\/span> The dispersal of plastic waste, which is ever harder to control, seems already present in its making: the trace of its movement from fossil fuel to commodity and its eventual disintegration into a dust that refuses to let go. Arguably, as artists have become increasingly aware of the incursion of plastics into environments, these relations are incrementally harder to disguise; the remaking of the world by plastics enters the gallery alongside and adhered to artworks made from synthetic polymer materials\u2014crossing porous boundaries between the inside and outside of galleries and moving into bodies, embodying what environmental historian Michelle Murphy has referred to as \u201cchemical regimes of living\u201d with a multiplicity of invisible toxic risks.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Michelle Murphy, \u201cChemical Regimes of Living,\u201d Environmental History<\/em> 13, no. 4 (October 2008): 695\u2013703.<\/span> As plastic artworks begin to age and crumble, do the toxins become increasingly visible over the course of their lifespan?<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Lawson&Robertson\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_LawsonRobertson_KirstyObjects_22-C-FLAT-scaled.jpg\")
Photo: Bruno Sinder<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n