Mariah Reading can make just about anything into a canvas.

She is an eco artist who uses trash and marine debris to create paintings and other works of art.

“I go around to different protected landscape environments finding trash and debris left behind, and then I paint the landscape where the trash was found onto the item itself,” she said, “and then hold it up so it’s kind of superimposed within the landscape and photograph it so it blends in.”

It makes a statement about what humans leave behind. She worked as an interpretive ranger on Isle Royale from in 2022 and 2023, and her coworkers there knew about her passion for environmental art.

When Isle Royale got a NOAA grant for a project about marine debris in the Great Lakes, it was the perfect convergence of her talents.

She and others collected items like buoys, fishing lures, and even a whole abandoned boat. Reading said Isle Royale is a unique park.

“It is the least-visited park in the Lower 48. And it’s very clean,” she said. “You know, the people who come to the park are stewards of that park. They love Isle Royale.”

But marine debris floats in from elsewhere.

“I think we’ve been talking a lot about it in the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, where things come from and float from, but we’re also experiencing it in the Great Lakes, the inland seas,” Reading said. “So I hope that the project kind of highlights that many hands make light work and that we can all kind of do our part to find things big and small and pick up after ourselves.”

All of the items she collected and made into art are in the “Supporting Superior: A Marine Debris Exhibit” at Rock Harbor on Isle Royale.

More of Reading’s art can be seen on her Instagram page.