The Great Nurdle Hunt
Greetings fellow Alchemists & Creators,
I am delighted to welcome you to the Inky Alchemist Society with my first Projects Chamber post. I am so glad you found your way here. Please forgive me for being a little slow with my first post. I have been super busy ironing out any little bugs within our creative Society and making sure everything is as it should be and working properly for you.
I will be adding posts under various project categories and this will be the first in a short series of posts about an environmental project I am currently working on. The whole project comes to fruition next month with a group exhibition with the prompt, ‘The Life Cycle of a Nurdle’. Staying true to my nature as The Inky Alchemist I am of course putting a slight fantasy spin on my piece for the exhibition and will share more with you on my creative piece over the next few weeks.
But first things first just in case you don’t know what a ‘NURDLE’ is please read on… I confess I hadn’t a clue before I started working on this project. If you have been following along with my vlog you may already have seen me join a local nurdle hunt.
Even the tiniest of things can prompt a revolution…
“Nurdles are tiny plastic pellets about the size of lentils. They are the building blocks of plastic and get melted down and turned into plastic items in factories. ”
How it started..?
This project all started with the first handful of tiny plastic pellets I found on the shore — nurdles. They may look insignificant, but these small plastic beads are the raw material used to make almost everything plastic. Lost during production and transportation, they can find their way into our waterways and eventually our oceans, where they can persist for decades and be mistaken for food by wildlife.
For this new project, I’m bringing together my love of collecting, storytelling, natural materials and a little bit of alchemy to explore the journey of these seemingly insignificant objects — and the much bigger story they tell about our relationship with plastic.
I’m not quite ready to reveal the whole thing yet… but I thought I’d let you in on the beginning.
Because sometimes the smallest things have the biggest stories to tell.