Meet Ms. Marine De Bris, a wild, zany off-beat woman made of trash found along our waterways, and her creator Kelsey Williams, LRNow intern and First Colonial High School senior.

Until Marine came along, Kelsey disliked the thought of art so much that she avoided taking a required class and is now taking art online in order to graduate!

But while creating Marine, Kelsey started to think about art more “and the light it brings to certain heavy subjects.”

“I’ve become really fond of the art world and the way it can interpret these tough topics such as plastic pollution effects on health,” she added.

Kelsey, who attends Virginia Beach Public School’s Environmental Studies Program at the Brock Center, created Marine in LRNow’s upstairs office meeting room. She worked with former Advocacy Coordinator Molly Riley.

“Trash was everywhere!” Kelsey said.

And though they never met, Kelsey also drew inspiration form Carol Chewning, LRNow supporter and dedicated all round advocate of less trash (mainly plastic) in the environment. Carol keeps a huge stash of trash she has found and always hopes to find a use for it.

Enter Kelsey and her project and some of Carol’s trash became the art medium for Kelsey’s sculpture.

“After that, it was all zip ties, tons of hot glue and spray paint,” Kesey said. “Zip ties are the answer to everything.”

Carol also was the inspiration behind the name, Ms. Marine De Bris. The first of many of Carol’s trash-inspired Halloween costumes was an old sweatshirt on which she sewed plastic litter, such as utensils, straws and food containers. That Halloween, Carol called herself, Marine De’Bris.

When namesake Ms. Marine becomes more transportable, she will attend LRNow Events to put an exclamation point on the problems with trash in our environment, particularly plastic.

Marine sports not only chicken wire clothing and a plastic- bag purse that contains a sea turtle made of trash, but also visible lungs, reproductive system and blood vessels, all made of plastic that stress how plastics end up in all parts of our bodies.

“It’s one thing to see how plastic is visually,” Kelsey said, “and it is another thing to really understand what it does.”

To further understand how to deal with public health aspects of plastic, Kelsey also attends the Legal Studies Academy at her home school, First Colonial. She will be the first student in Virginia Beach to graduate having completed both programs.

It was important to do both, she said, since she was interested not only in the effects trash has on the environment but also on health.

“I wrote my extensive research paper specifically on how plastic pollution affects human health,” she said.

Kelsey will head to the University of Alabama in the fall where she will major in philosophy and liberal arts and is thinking about law school in the future.

Multitalented Kelsey is on the gymnastic team at First Colonial and she also raises chickens with her family at her home in southern Virginia Beach.

It’s not surprising that she turned out to be an artist too.