Artist Jackie Ranney

27 Balloons (2023), 60″H x 48″W, marine debris and mixed media

Cap It (2023), 70″H x 55″W, marine debris and mixed media.

and Windy (2024), 50″H x 40″W, marine debris and mixed media.

Artist Jackie Ranney collecting and cleaning in Hull, Massachusetts.

Go With the Flow (2023), 60″H x 48″W, marine debris and mixed media.

Ranney in her studio.

Knot Works (2024), 48″H x 48″W, marine debris and mixed media.

Rise and Set (2024), 48″H x 40″W each, marine debris and mixed media

When Jackie Ranney’s son was eight he said to her, “Your generation has left the world a mess.”

She couldn’t disagree. Always an environmentalist, Ranney knew that an aquarium near her home had to perform frequent surgeries on sea turtles because they mistake floating and decaying plastic bags and balloons in the ocean for jellyfish, eat them, and, without help, either die from clogged digestive systems or from starvation because the bags make them unable to dive for food. She knew that mother whales struggled to nurse their young because they were so entangled in thousand-pound globs of discarded fishing nets and other plastic. The questions for Ranney were, what could one person do? And surrounded by such a mess, why make art?

The answers to these questions came to her while walking the beach near her home in Hull, Massachusetts, doing her daily trash pick-up. She noticed that a particular scrap from a fiberglass boat hull, with its blue-green patina, was actually quite beautiful. It dawned on her that rather than dump all that flotsam she’d collected into a landfill, she could use it in her art.

It took Ranney, who grew up outside of Boston and studied at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, the University of Redlands in California, and the Sorbonne University in Paris, several misses before she hit on the techniques she now uses. She plasters, glues, and paints strips of mylar balloons, Styrofoam, and fish netting she has gleaned from the beach onto recycled pieces
of insulation board, building up layers into ridges and swirls that cast changing shadows in the light—and need to be seen in person to be fully appreciated.

The resulting art is not only pleasing to look at, communicating Ranney’s love for oceans, beaches, and the natural world, but it interacts. Collectors of her art, proud to have turned so many bags of trash into something beautiful, challenge viewers to find the various ingredients that Ranney often lists on the work. Like Where’s Waldo?, searching for that tiny piece of glove, bungee cord, or traffic cone begins a conversation about our own use of balloons or plastic bags, which often results in more people helping to clean up the mess.