Sarah Turner

We know that recycling is a current issue today and so does Award winning Eco-artist and designer Sarah Turner, who works with plastic bottles, giving them a new life and a new purpose by reincarnating them creatively to make decorative lighting. She says she is "Completely obsessed with making beautiful, functional items from waste materials" Born in Essex but currently based in Nottingham, Sarah graduated from university in 2008. While Sarah was at university, she worked in a coffee shop where she noticed a lot of plastic bottles were thrown away, so she began collecting them to use for her sculpted pieces that she still creates today. Even as a child she had an obsession with raw material and she finds it hard to throw something away that could be useful. Her work is inspired by organic objects which heavily and obviously influence her work. The idea of recycling and manipulating waste material into organic objects seems perfectly fitting, personally suggesting to me that waste plastic bottles are an environmental threat, so by combining the two together this message is communicated.

Sarah sandblasts the bottles to turn the translucent plastic into an opaque material, diffusing light and transforming the cheap object into something that looks and feels reasonably high quality. Some of her pieces are even dyed vibrant colours which I think widens her target audience from modern interior design to even a suitable light for a child's room. Then intricate craftsmanship comes into play to turn the sandblasted plastic bottles into delicate individual decorative forms. She hand cuts the plastic bottles with a pair of scissors, measuring the cuts by eye. This is of course the tricky part, requiring skill and great hardship, but Sarah thrives off the challenge that raw material sets her, as they are less malleable than new materials, but this restriction  leaves her feeling more than satisfied with a finished piece. In fact, the plastic bottles have been that manipulated that you almost don't recognise that it was once just an  empty plastic bottle. Sarah believes that "just because a product is made from rubbish, it doesn't need to look like it does" and that is exactly what she has proven.
Sarah's eco-lights have been an incredible success and have been exhibited in a selection of famous galleries in London, Milan, Paris, LA and Nottingham.