Leah Mannes

Albany Senior High School

Year 11

Oil on canvas

75.5 x 60.5 x 20 cm

In this artwork I am expressing how our current culture of waste, particularly single-use disposable products, is destroying our natural world. The dead duckling symbolises the extinction of future generations of species and the devastating impact our waste has on the environment. When we choose to pollute our world with single-use plastics we are choosing the empty convenience of the smooth, uniform, plastic duck over the real thing – the sentient life form of a unique duckling. We choose a dead material object over the preciousness and vastness of life itself. If we continue degrading ourselves and our environment, the plastic duck will be all we have left to remember.