It's been a year since the Kennedy Center reached out to GW to help create an innovative art piece for RiverRun, a festival celebrating the world’s rivers, and Tara Scully looks to "reshape" more waters.
A Kennedy Center costume and set designer Celia Ledón combined forces with GW's Innovation Center, Tara Scully — the Director of the Sustainability Minor Program and an Assistant Professor of Biology at GW — and her students to better understand what kind of trash is left behind around D.C.
The artist knitted and crocheted fishing lines below the flowing gown of sculpted water to represent the messy pollutants engulfing water everywhere today. The sculpture installation is called "The Shape of Water."
Courtesy of Lily Speredelozzi | GW Today
Over 1,000 volunteer hours by GW students as well as George Mason and Georgetown universities helped make the project possible. Students were overwhelmingly shocked to find that when they categorized the trash they collected into two groups, most of the trash picked up was food-related as opposed to non-food related items.
“You can hear the conversations that people are having around the installation, and it's very striking to hear them understand the issue of how many plastics we are using in our day-to-day lives and thinking about how to change that themselves,” Scully said.
From October 2022 through March 2023, students, faculty, staff and volunteers collected single-use plastic from cleanups at Rock Creek Park and other water sites, the Kennedy Center, and from trash audits around the GW campus.
She said it's important to her that her students are going out and seeing how pollutants affect certain communities, most disproportionately the communities of color around D.C. She said the trash often gets carried by storm water runoff and is not the fault of the community members who consider the area their home, making it a bigger issue of how to tackle the burdens of waste.
"It's been a really wonderful conversation to have with students to bring up these issues of not having a home, what homes look like, what homes feel like, what homes can be like," she said.
Scully said she has noticed that following the pandemic, students are more outgoing after they interact with their community and that these service courses offer an outlet for students to find their voice again.
She said she enjoys seeing how students can apply the information from the classroom to real-world issues, such as nutrition practices and climate change.
"To see the impact that it's had on how they think about environmental issues has been really touching to me," Scully said.
Scully said she will continue to use projects in her service learning courses to provide an eye-opening experience for students and other D.C. locals.
