Witches’ knickers and carrier bag theories: thinking through plastics

Plastics are frequently characterised either as beautiful and adaptive or as unauthentic and destructive: this chapter considers how creative approaches to such everyday materials can sustain more complex investigations and can produce affective and multivalent readings. Developing from work for Witches’ Knickers, an independent artist’s publication, it explores a series of creative encounters with plastic bags and takes such bags as both material and metaphor for artistic research. Through an attention to the feminist scholarship of Elizabeth Fisher and the ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’ proposed by Ursula le Guin, it suggests a way of bringing together apparently disparate material, and of holding in tension differently valued and potentially contradictory ideas about plastics.