Home Again,
Home Again

Artist Statement

Home is the place we return to, the place we care for, the place we imagine will sustain us. But what happens when the place we call home becomes increasingly overwhelmed by the things we have made and discarded?

Since 1999, we have collected plastic from Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore, bringing home what the ocean has returned to us. What began as an encounter with plastic pollution has become something much larger: an ongoing meditation on our relationship with the planet and on the extraordinary persistence of the materials we create.

Plastic is now woven into nearly every aspect of contemporary life. It surrounds us, carries our food, packages our purchases, clothes our bodies, and fills our homes. Once discarded, however, it rarely disappears. It fragments, travels, accumulates, and finds its way into rivers, oceans, soil, air, and the bodies of living things. The shoreline becomes a kind of ledger—a record of our habits and our collective failure to imagine where our things go when we are finished with them.

Our work is an effort at planetary housekeeping: picking up, sorting, washing, arranging, and transforming what has been left behind. There is something humble and almost domestic about this work. We gather the fragments as one might sweep a floor or tidy a room, except that the room is the world itself.

The title Home Again, Home Again carries a double meaning. It speaks to the desire to return to a place that feels familiar and cared for, while reminding us that there is no separate place to return to. This is our home. The ocean, the shoreline, the rivers, and the landscapes around us are not somewhere else—they are part of the same household.

By transforming discarded plastic into art, we are not trying to make pollution beautiful or to disguise the problem. Rather, we want to hold these objects in our attention long enough to see them differently: as evidence of our choices, as traces of daily life, and as reminders of our profound dependence on the natural world.

Perhaps planetary housekeeping begins with simply paying attention—seeing what has accumulated, picking it up, and asking what kind of home we want to leave behind.

Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang
One Beach Plastic

Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang

Since 1999, Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang — working together as One Beach Plastic — have walked the same 1,000 meters of tideline at Kehoe Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore, hundreds of times. From this single stretch of Northern California coast, they have gathered over two tons of plastic debris carried in on the Pacific. Each piece is carefully collected and curated — not transformed, not disguised — and arranged into artworks that let the material speak plainly for itself. The result is quietly startling: what first reads as color, pattern, and form reveals itself to be the thermoplastic residue of our throwaway culture, washed ashore and stubbornly, almost defiantly, beautiful.