“A Feather on the Breath of God” is the name of an extraordinary vehicle, a moving work, a 1980 white Chevy pickup truck festooned with hundreds of pounds of white plastic all collected from Kehoe Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore. It was created by Noah Lang, Richard Lang, and Judith Selby Lang. Shards of plastic, fragments from containers, hundreds of lids from water bottles, tiparillo tips, and tampon applicators were formed into patterns of waves and sunbursts on the sides, roof, and hood of the truck. 1800 lights entwined with the plastic transform the truck at night into a luminous apparition.

We travel with this truck to numerous community events and art exhibitions. It gives us the opportunity to talk with people about the detrimental effects of plastic on beach and ocean life and to have some fun along the way.

The California Coastal Commission reports in their publication “The Problem with Marine Debris” that there are 46,000 pieces of visible plastic floating in every square mile of the ocean. This shocking fact along with our inability to visualize the magnitude of that quantity has compelled us to count and exhibit 46,000 plastic pieces collected from California beaches.

“Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.”

So wrote Hildegard von Bingen, a remarkable and creative personality from the Middle Ages (1098-1179) — in fact, the most celebrated woman of her age. She was acclaimed as a visionary, naturalist, playwright, poet and composer, as well as politician. She wrote these words to describe her musical incantations and chants. As artists we affirm her words in title of the truck, in the message of the shards of plastic, in the debris from the beach.

Judith Selby Lang

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 9:37 pm and is filed under trash my ride. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.