Influenced by Japanese boro mending, Gees Bend quilt making, Arte Povera and colour field abstract painting, Farrell’s textiles propose a future where plastic is instead a cherished and mystical material that signifies care, wisdom and feminine power. Using plastic encountered in daily life to make abstract compositions, she revises the persistent binary of textile as feminine and painting as masculine, as well as the aesthetic value of plastic via laborious craft-based processes.

Farrell’s work inscribes found plastic with the labour of craft and with the language of abstract painting to destabilise comfortable assumptions about craft and art. Hand-stitched patchworks of different plastic colours and textures, with coloured cotton threads creating surfaces that shimmer and transform plastic into a precious material.

Plastic was once considered a magical material. It was envisaged as a thing that could take the shape of almost anything that humans desired. Yet it has long since become ubiquitous and devalued, synonymous with inauthenticity and cheapness whereas the word in its original sense meant flexibility, possibility, malleability. We now understand that it is made from finite natural resources and it does not ever break down. Its overuse and the massive and horrifying piles of it in oceans and landfill further associate it with the current age of human-generated climate change. It has become a sign of not-caring, of not enough care being taken.