Annie Graham
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Aug 12
- 3 min read
Annie Graham is an American artist living in Portugal. Her work begins with collecting plastic waste from her surroundings. She transforms these fragments into layered collages that connect painting, drawing, and textile traditions. In the studio, she spends time sorting and arranging small pieces until a sense of order emerges. Light and movement are key elements in her process, often changing how the work feels throughout the day. Through decoration, symbolism, and pieces like the "moon altar," she explores how beauty and meaning can be shaped from discarded material.
Q: Your practice begins with collecting plastic waste from your surroundings. What draws you to these discarded materials, and what does the act of collecting mean to you?
A: When I moved to Baleal, Portugal, I started going to beach cleanups and my eyes were opened to the abundance of plastic trash in the environment, not just on the beach, but all around. Once you are conscious of the problem, there are some emotional cycles I think many people go through: energized, then frustration, anger, sadness, overwhelm.Collecting, cleaning, and sorting for me is a way to process all of these emotions and stay connected to the land and sea.
Q: You often work with transparent, reflective and fragmented surfaces. What do these visual qualities offer you when shaping a composition?
A: I like the surprises of light playing over these kinds of surfaces, and how the artworks change throughout the day and seasons. Sometimes I manage to catch a moment of elevation, a kind of religious glow. The fragmented aspect is more "natural," I guess, for trash. I'm just a sucker for tiny pieces—arranging them calms my mind in a huge way.
Q: Your collages move between painting, drawing and textiles. How do you approach these hybrid forms when starting a new piece?
A: The material collection gives rise to the form.Plastic bags make good flags, microplastics from the beach are like beads for embellishment. I try to let the materials speak to me, which in practice means a lot of sorting and moving piles around in the studio.
Q: You use plastic to question ideas of value and emotion. How do you think these meanings shift when the material is placed in an artistic context?
A: It depends what you mean by artistic context. I think most things look "better" in a white cube space, or at least are easier to consider visually. The negative emotions of a polluted beach or overflowing trash bins are neutralized also by all the process and action of bringing coherence and beauty to the material through the creation of the art object.
But overall, value is already tricky in an artistic context, assigned by many factors and often more obviously invented than out in the "real world," which is fun!
For sure plastic will one day be the rare material specific to late-stage capitalism, and I hope my artifacts endure and accrue more and more value.
Q: Decoration and symbolism appear throughout your work. What kind of imagery or forms are you most drawn to, and why?
A: I am obsessed with the moon—she reminds us every night that we are floating in space, which is a good thing to remember. Lately I have been using more simplified geometric forms that speak about the physical forces that shape our reality, from the grand cosmic to quantum in scale. Pyramids are all about man and his ego, and weave structures tie it all together. Decoration is about reverence and the devotion of the maker.
Q: You’ve started thinking about art objects as part of ritual. What does “usefulness” mean to you in that space between object and experience?
A: A spiritual or religious experience can have infinite usefulness to a person. It's interesting to think about the art object as a key to open a new level of consciousness or even as a channel for it. I am working towards more direct experience with this so I can speak more expansively on the topic.
Right now I'm working on a collection of images for my moon altar.