Sea Cliff artists, residents ‘reclaim the beach’

The wooden picnic table in the middle of K. DiResta Collective, painted an enchanting turquoise blue, boasted bins full of pipe cleaners, beads, markers, and fabric scraps.

Among this collection of crafts were also plastic filtration disks, which were transformed by local artists and residents into stunning works of art last Saturday. This repurposing of materials into new forms is known as “upcycling.”

The budding artists had plenty supplies to work with, at least as far as the plastic disks were concerned. In late March 2011, a water treatment plant in Mamaroneck had accidentally released approximately 21 million of these disks into the Long Island Sound. Hundreds of thousands of these filtration devices ended up on the beaches of the North Shore, from Port Washington to Mattituck.

A small group of volunteers from the Coalition to Save Hempstead Harbor scavenged the beaches in Sea Cliff and Glenwood Landing, and recovered over 25,000 disks in one hour. The Sound was now in great shape, but didn’t know what to do with the plastic disks.

Barbara Karyo, of Sea Cliff, pocketing them had an idea. Perhaps she could repurpose them, and make a statement about how humans abuse the environment, and the creatures that inhabit it.

Karyo decided to construct a big fish using the disks. Members of the community joined Karyo to help tie together the thousands of disks she would use for her project, one by one.

“In trying to find a way to repurpose these disks, I considered how I had found many of them, tangled up in the straw, shells and seaweed at the high tide line along the beaches where [we] collected them,” said Sally Shore, an artist who also helped the coalition recover the plastic filtration disks from the beaches.

“Tying them together with narrow ribbons in the colors of the vegetation was the most satisfying of my solutions,” Shore added. “I envisioned them being seen from both sides, either hanging flat as if floating on the surface of the water, or as a two-sided partition.”

Both Karyo and Lori Pappas, a dedicated upcycler in the community, had hands-on activities for residents at the event.