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Detail from “Gyre.”

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Anna Hepler in her studio on Fore Street in Portland. She hopes “Gyre” will encourage people to think about the plastic they discard and where it might end up.

enlarge Courtesy of Center for Maine Contemporary Art

Visitors study Anna Hepler’s “Gyre,” an installation at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport. The piece, which takes the shape of a boat hull and is suspended from the walls and ceiling of the gallery, is fashioned from discarded plastic reclaimed from a Portland recycling center.

enlarge Courtesy of Center for Maine Contemporary Art

The large scale of “Gyre” is a departure for Anna Hepler, who is well-known for her smaller drawings, woodcuts and wire constructions, such as this sphere.

After you see Anna Hepler's installation at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, you'll never take your groceries in a plastic bag again.

Hepler, one of Maine's leading professional contemporary visual artists, stitched together strips of shredded plastic into lattice shapes and suspended them from the ceiling and walls of the CMCA's loft gallery. Mostly blue and white, the plastic mass takes the shape of a boat's hull, filling the room so that it's impossible for a grown adult to walk underneath it.

She calls her piece "Gyre."

The impetus for the installation came when Hepler began researching something known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a huge area of marine debris in the north Pacific Ocean. The swirling vortex, trapped by the currents of the north Pacific gyre, is characterized by high concentrations of suspended plastics and other debris.

By some estimates, the area contains more than 100 million tons of trash, which is carried by currents from Asia and North America.

Hepler was horrified when she read accounts of the marine dump, which stretches across the ocean for hundreds of miles.

"It's very disturbing, because plastic doesn't ever disappear," she said. "We have this great pile, this unbelievably large pile of plastic, and we have to figure out how to deal with it."

With "Gyre," Hepler is interested in conveying "the tenuous feeling of being underneath a massive form floating overhead," while also revealing something about the nature of its construction and how individual pieces are part of a larger whole.

WORKING IN A VARIETY OF MEDIA

Hepler, 39, lives in Portland with her husband, Jon Calame, and their two children, ages 1 and 3. She teaches art at Bowdoin College in Brunswick.

Since moving to Maine in 2001, Hepler has established herself as one of the state's most active visual artists, working in all manner of media and in a great variety of scale. She has shown her drawings, prints, sculpture and other work regularly in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Maine and out of state.

She was part of the 2008 biennial at CMCA, the 2006 DeCordova Annual at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Mass., and the Maine Print Project in 2006, and has shown in galleries and museums from Washington to New York, New Mexico to Michigan.

She also has exhibited overseas, in Tokyo and Seoul.

"Gyre," on view through March 21, represents a bit of a departure for Hepler. She is best known for making smallish pieces – drawings, woodcuts, spheres and other objects. But "Gyre" fills almost the entire gallery, measuring somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 feet long and 15 feet wide.

It's not an unprecedented work for Hepler: She filled a Seattle gallery last year with a sprawling installation of stainless steel and aluminum rods and PVC discs. But "Gyre" marks the first time she's attempted a project of such ambition in Maine

She and a team of assistants spent eight days constructing the piece prior to the January opening.

After living with the installation for a few days, Hepler detected an unintended continuum between "Gyre" and some of her earlier work, particularly her small-scale spheres and other wire constructions. The pieces are linked by their shared concern for space, shape and volume.

In that sense, "Gyre" almost feels like one of her spacial drawings, played out on a very large scale.

PLASTIC A PLEASING MEDIUM

Hepler decided to work with plastic long before she researched the garbage patch. Plastic is forgiving and translucent, she said, and its flexibility appealed to her.

As a prototype and to begin stockpiling ideas for the installation, she sewed together short strips of plastic to create a piece of lattice. She wanted to see how the material would respond to her manipulation, and she liked the result very much.

Her...