When University of North Carolina Wilmington faculty member Bonnie Monteleone was just 12 years old, she remembered her mother taking beef out of its plastic casing while preparing dinner and asking the question, “Where does all of this plastic go?” After four voyages around the gyres to collect plastic samples, Monteleone never could have guessed that the answer to her mother’s question would transform into art.

 Monteleone’s premiere exhibit will open to the public Sept. 22 at The Ann Flack Boseman Gallery in Fisher University Union at 6 p.m. Her exhibit will consist of artifacts and pictures that she has collected from her voyages, traveling about 8000 nautical miles around the world and to various gyres including the North Atlantic and North Pacific. The first voyage that Monteleone embarked on as a part of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at the UNCW set out to the North Atlantic in July 2009.

“[The exhibit consists of] images, PhotoShopped images for the most part, of the debris that I have collected from three different oceans but I’ve been on four different voyages, two in the North Atlantic, two in the North Pacific sailing from Hawaii to California right through the garbage patch,” Monteleone said.

 Monteleone’s exhibit entitled “What Goes Around, Comes Around,” derives from the idea that our use and improper disposal of plastic does eventually come back to harm us.

“I realized that we were finding these micro plastics in our samples and then I went to these beaches and I found that these same micro plastics were washing in and onto the beaches. So what’s happening is it goes out and then it comes back around to us and ends up on islands or resorts or places that we aspire to go to, and it is very difficult to clean it up when it gets to this point,” Monteleone said. “Its really bad for [the marine life] and what happens is the chemicals floating around in our ocean absorb onto these plastics and then the marine life are eating the plastic and we are eating the marine life. So we are getting a bio magnified dose of chemicals.”

Having a Bachelor’s degree in communication with a special interest in journalism, it was always Monteleone’s goal to get involved with scientific writing. Soon after she began working at UNCW, Monteleone became fascinated by the amount of research being performed around campus and soon became inspired to do her own research by the work done in the chemistry department.

“It started because my friend was actually taking a course and I had just recently started working here and I was just really jazzed by the amount of research. I had no idea that we were doing that type of stuff here,” Monteleone said. “And I thought that we weren’t getting enough press and maybe if I just got recertified in writing or took some creative writing or scientific writing courses I would be able to write about the research going on here. Little did I know that it was going to manifest into my own.”

In order to collect the artifacts and other micro plastics that will be shown in the exhibit, Monteleone used 10-foot-long nets, a surface dwelling device that is about a meter wide by a meter deep, and searched beaches in major accumulation zones.

“We found 12 inches of micro plastics on one beach,” Monteleone said. “Sometimes its not so easy because of the boat going up and down and the reflection off of the water, so it becomes quite a challenge.”

Finally, after collecting enough artifacts and photos over her four voyages, Monteleone decided to combine her passion for scientific research with her minor in studio art as a means of getting her environmental message across in a nonjudgmental way.

“I tried to make it so that it wasn’t damning, that you would look at it and it would make you feel bad. I wanted to make it so that people make the connections between the environment and ourselves and what we are doing and what we can do to stop that environmental impact,” Monteleone said. “I’m hoping people get it. The research I do, not everyone can go and your not going to see it if you just walk to the beach, so you have to be the ambassador for the ocean. I’m hoping that what I brought back gets the point across that this problem is very, very big and its hurting not only ourselves but marine life and that we are the only ones that can do something about it.”

A reception will be held at the Boseman gallery Sept. 22 from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. in which viewers can ask Monteleone about her artwork and voyages. Monteleone’s goal, besides making people more aware of the effects of plastic on our environment, is to move her exhibit to universities that are more inland as a means of impacting people who would otherwise not create a correlation between their use of plastic and the waste in the sea.

“I’m going to enjoy explaining each piece thoroughly. I don’t know what kind of impact it might have if it was a land locked university, I would love to see it end up there I am hoping that it will take to the road and that I will be able to set it up at different universities,” Monteleone said. “And I would love to talk to them because they do not make the connection that it is their fault or they have any contribution to this problem, but anything that you see on the street can be swept up and end up on the beach or in streams and in our ocean.”

Along with the artifacts that Monteleone is planning on displaying in the exhibit is a wave made completely out of one-time use plastics that people will be able to climb in and interact with along with PhotoShopped images of the wave and other pieces to represent the five gyres. In the five photos, plastics are manipulated to look like the Great Wave of Kanagawa, a Japanese art made of a wood block print published in the 1800’s to help represent a time when there was no plastic.

“So there is going to be a series of five images and they represent the five gyres, I’ve been to three of them so two of them represent what I’ve found. One is going to be of the micro plastics the other one is of the plastics that I found while I was out at sea,” Monteleone said.

In order to have an exhibit at the Boseman gallery artists must submit artwork to the student committee at UNCW in the spring. Monteleone’s work was chosen as one of the unique exhibits that are to be shown this semester.

“One reason why [Monteleone’s] work was selected was the relationship that our region has with the ocean and the connection with marine biology and how she was able to connect [those subjects] and bring attention to this issue using art,” said Shane Fernando, Interim Director of Arts and Programs.

On Monteleone’s second voyage to the plastic islands she joined a catamaran that traveled from Hawaii to Crystal Cove Beach in California to collect plastic samples that were floating in the ocean, one of which covered an area as large as Texas.

“There we sailed 3400 nautical miles and did 54 samples and every one of them had plastic in it,” Monteleone said. “It was far worse than the North Pacific.”

What Monteleone originally began as researched turned into artwork through her massive accumulation of plastics that she found all over the world including beaches in Cape Town South Africa, Brazil, Bermuda and North Carolina. As a part of this project, she learned about various environmental problems including carbon dioxide levels and overfishing and soon began to realize that her art could have a large impact on the amount of one-time use plastics utilized in everyday life.

“This is one (environmental problem) that we can fix. Its not easy, but we can fix it,” Monteleone said. “It really is working on it just 55% and it gets easier when you start to do those types of things. Just really subtle little changes, and if the 300 million people that live in this country just took that on we would reduce the amount of plastic that we use.”