Students walk into school one day and find a tree covered in plastic bags. They’re thinking: Is this because of the visual art kids? Is this some environmental movement? Why is this here? Where’s the Lorax?

Yes, this is a visual arts project and yes, the message is about the environment. The Lorax doesn’t need to worry about this one. “What I tried to do was portray different ways of plastic bag usage and how its convenience can lead to our decay,” says senior visual artist Cassandra Ayala. With her 3D sculpture, Ayala won first place in the Senior Visual Arts Show.

3D art is not the medium that Ayala is used to working with, meaning this piece is not something she thought of doing herself, and she got out of her comfort zone to create it. “The judge came in and I was still putting labels… [and] it rained that day as the lady was judging it.”

After brainstorming and collecting a large quantity of plastic bags there was “a lot of trial and error.” Inspired by her research on plastic’s long-term effects on plant growth, she tested her idea on a sapling in her backyard. “I started wrapping [the bags] around and slowly working my way up to the top… to represent how we’re suffocating the plants based on how we use and discard plastic bags so easily and not really think about the consequences.” While the tree here at OCSA is much larger than a sapling, the plastic working its way up the tree portrays the same implication.

Ayala hoped that as everyone saw her art it would spark conversation. “A lot of kids were mainly just confused, which is good. I wanted good and bad feedback, more confusion, I thought that would be more interesting.” With all of the different ways her art is interpreted it is widely understood that this piece brings environmental awareness to mind. This also allowed Ayala to answer her question: “how do human desires and instinct affect the state of the environment?”