On the side of Route 127 in Arrowsic sits a towering sculpture of trash, created by a few teenagers and community members who found the debris in their local waterways.
Held together by rope, the artwork features bits of water bottles, boots, wooden signs and buoys, among other nondescript garbage. It’s not pretty, but lead artist Ren Kauffunger, 16, said that’s the point.
“We don’t want to romanticize it,” he said.
The town of Arrowsic has been faced with the reality of climate change in the last few years. The one road off the island to the mainland floods during storms, to the point that any vehicles with low ground clearance can’t leave. Wells are drying up. Community members are putting together a climate action plan to figure out how exactly the town of under 500 people can remediate the issues.
The sculpture, put up on Aug. 3, is part of that larger effort, Kauffunger said. This is the second year he led the construction and display of a sculpture of garbage in front of the town, and he plans to do it next year as well.
The point is to put the trash in front of people, and to acknowledge that it’s Arrowsic’s trash. Kauffunger wants people to think about the impact they have on the environment.
“A lot of the time, I feel like there’s concern about pollution and climate change and similar topics, but because it’s not right in front of us, it’s easy to get shoved aside,” Kauffunger said.
The process to build last year’s sculpture was simple: a group of residents from the islands in the area, including Arrowsic and Georgetown, collected trash in the marshes that surround the islands. They then stacked it, bound it with rope, and displayed the mass in front of the town office.
Kauffunger reused much of the trash from last year to build this year’s sculpture, he said. But about 20 community members also contributed new litter that was dispersed across the area by last winter’s storms.
The sculpture will stay up until Sept. 14, when Arrowsic holds its annual yard sale in front of the town office. It’s an event that lets people trade goods while raising money for graduating high school seniors, said Camille Kauffunger, Ren’s mother.
“We tend, on the islands, to be pretty scrappy about how we share resources,” Camille Kauffunger said.
The trash that isn’t used for next year’s sculpture will be recycled or thrown away, Ren Kauffunger said.
When he goes to college in a few years, Ren Kauffunger wants to study something that involves art and environmentalism. He doesn’t know how much his sculpture-creating relates to his future plans, but he wants to keep exploring the themes.
After he goes to college, he hopes someone else will take on the project.
Ren Kauffunger said his favorite parts of the sculpture are a scrap from a plastic kiddie pool and a long-lost high heel that tops the artwork. His friend Caleb Longbottom, who helped with the project, said theirs was the huge, orange plastic billet at the bottom. The teenagers said these pieces highlight not only that the pieces of trash came from the community, but also how tough it was to retrieve the larger scraps.
“This is our trash. We’re not disassociated from this. And it’s on us to make the change,” Kauffunger said.
