Installation view of Entanglement
Treefall, Mandel Public Library 2025
Entanglement 1, 2025
beach debris, plaster, ink
40 x 30 in
Entanglement 2, 2025
beach debris, plaster, ink
40 x 30 in
Entanglement 3, 2025
beach debris, plaster, ink
40 x 30 in
Eloise Janssen’s work transforms discarded materials into vessels for contemporary storytelling, challenging the traditional boundaries between waste and artifact. She asks us to reconsider not just what we throw away, but how we assign value and meaning to the material world around us.
Collecting, observing, and preserving trash found on the shores of her home in Florida is the core of Janssen’s artistic practice. She finds solace in retrieving lost objects: shards of plastic containers lined with barnacles, sun-bleached water bottles, abandoned fishing gear, plastic bags with evidence of bites from marine life, and so much more. Janssen’s formal training in archaeology provides a critical framework for her understanding of and approach towards these finds. After cleaning and cataloging, she encases the beach debris she finds in plaster, preserving and protecting what is often dismissed. Her works serve as an archive, primarily comprised of plastics returned from the sea.
The ocean acts as a curator, recontextualizing objects that find their way into the currents and eventually reach the shore. The identity of these objects has been washed away and eroded. By removing the context of an object, we can only focus on what remains. Remaining forms that hint at their past lives and functions, or the names of brands and manufacturers that remain etched onto the surface, are some of the small clues the debris whispers. We will never truly know the whole story. Beach debris cannot be tied to any individual; it can only be observed as a product of the systems we have created.
In her new body of work, Entanglement, Janssen incorporates etchings into the plaster surrounding pieces of embedded beach debris, drawing upon imagery of ghost nets—discarded or lost fishing gear that continues causing significant harm to aquatic ecosystems. The nets exemplify the entanglement that connects the plastics featured in her artworks to the plastics all around us. Viewers exploring the bits of fragments frozen in her plaster works of Entanglement can find echoes of items we know and use every day.
We shape our materials, and they, in turn, shape us. This tension between humans and their materials is known as entanglement theory in archaeology, primarily associated with Ian Hodder, an archaeologist, who views human-material relationships as deeply interdependent and complex, where societies and individuals are “entangled” within their material worlds. Entanglement reflects the all-encompassing web of plastics that we find ourselves in today.
Eloise Janssen’s Entanglement series creates space for larger conversations about consumption, waste, and the lasting impact of corporate actions. Her practice demonstrates that examining the materials that surround us more closely, understanding them as artifacts of our own making and markers of the complex relationships between culture and material that define contemporary life, is essential. Fundamentally, Janssen’s practice is about attention—the quiet act of noticing what others overlook or ignore.