The Lost Art of Bubble Wrap

(Finding beauty in the ordinary)

Beauty likes to hide in plain sight.

Take bubble wrap…

It’s an ordinary, disposable utility item. Invisible. The more ordinary something is, the more likely we are to miss the hidden beauty. But if you pause to appreciate something as basic as bubble warp, it doesn’t take long before you discover unrealized possibility.

For example, you could take a piece of bubble wrap and cover it with isopropyl alcohol. Then you could press a shipping label against it and add heat from an iron. Like magic, an intricate black and white pattern will emerge from the paper. I like to cut these patterns into shapes that I use in my thermal paper collages.

When I show people my bubble wrap art, I ask them if they can tell where the pattern came from. It’s not as easy as you might think. Some people can connect the dots but most of have brains organized like filing cabinets. Bubble wrap doesn’t exist outside the mental bucket we dropped it in when we were kids. Perhaps we discovered the wonderful pop-making capabilities of bubble wrap only to be shamed for making too much noise. A scolding may seem trivial, but it blocks imagination. We get old and wonder why life is so mundane. Why is everything so ugly?

That’s why beauty can hide in plain sight. But it’s there far all of us, if we know how to look for it. Stay creative.

Your friend,
Ade

P.S. You can see more of my bubble wrap technique in this YouTube short.