If you walked into St. Albans Church on Sept. 18-26, you would have been confronted with a giant inflatable dome made of recycled plastics.
Emily Allan and Dom Di Libero, the Montréal-based immersive art duo “Studio Rat,” travels Québec and Ontario to share their creative use of non-biodegradable plastics. Allan and Di Libero shared their techniques in a workshop with Ottawans while seated inside their piece titled, L.D.P.E. (Lovely, Dreamy Plastic Experience) Quilt.
The inflatable is made of different colour and textured plastics that Allan and Di Libero have found in their daily lives. The duo’s effort around mending plastics to create inflatables began in 2018.
“Dom and I studied interior design at Toronto Metropolitan University, [and] began working together on extracurricular projects, like inflatable art installations,” Allan said. “It was through that that we quickly felt complicated about our plastic use.”
Both Allan and Di Libero noticed how plastic is everywhere and will last forever.
“We were really easily entranced at the beginning by the accessibility of the material,” Di Libero said. “Working with it, we could rapidly create an immersive space that we’d never been in before.”
Ontario Culture Days is a non-profit organization that hosts a yearly festival to bring art and culture to municipalities within Ontario. Callum Jeacle is a project producer with the organization and helped bring the Plastiscapes experience to Ottawa.
“These free events, through the course of three weeks, is just one of the places where you can do an unconventional thing with art,” Jeacle said. “[It’s] something that looks kind of cheap, but it also forces us to look at the mundane, everyday nature of plastic.”
Centre 454 sits in the basement of St. Albans Church to provide support for unhoused people in the Sandy Hill neighbourhood. For Jeacle, it was important to make space for the unhoused individuals who call St. Albans home.
“There is an unhoused community around here that relies on services in the area,” he said. “It’s the nature of the way the city has failed people for years.”
“Free to enter means its free to enter for everyone so, we approach it with love,” Jeacle said.
Studio Rat hosted a two-hour workshop, starting with a seminar and ending with an interactive experience where guests were able to mend plastics together. Some collaged different colour pieces together, one made a pouch, and others simply learned how to mend different types and thicknesses of plastics.
“We sort, wash, and then we usually collage scraps of plastice together using a t-shirt transfer heat press,” Di Libero explained.
“We work so large scale because we hope to program our inflatables with workshops and bring in other people,” Allan said.
Allan and Di Libero both described the importance of community and sharing knowledge.
“We get to meet other people that are interested in these ways of making,” Di Libero said. “We can share the things we’ve learned and a lot of the time, new communication lines are opened.”