Rising Tide
I visited the Rising Tide exhibition in the National Museum of Scotland. This was a sobering experience. Subtitled Art and Environment in Oceania, it features a region consisting of Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Along with rising sea levels due to global warming – rising faster than anywhere else in the world – the area is threatened with plastic pollution. The exhibition is a celebration of these communities through their art, which is a response to the environmental challenges they face. It features innovative use of plastic, calling for creative and urgent action to address the climate emergency.
This is a thought provoking installation, featuring single-use plastic, repurposed as art to make the point we are destroying the oceans and the life it contains by the continual dumping of materials. Oceania produces a fraction of the world’s plastic, less than 1%, but has an extremely high accumulation of the world’s plastic in its waters due to ocean currents. It is estimated that their seas contain 70% of all of the plastics in the world’s oceans.
One of the main installations is Bottled Ocean, an imagining one hundred years into the future when the ice caps have melted, all of the earth has flooded and plastic is everywhere, impacting on all life. The single-use plastic has been turned into depictions of Maori cultural treasures and sacred marine animals. The image accompanying this blog is one I took of that display.
Wherever possible I have been making effort to cut out single-use plastic, avoiding purchasing items that use it and I recycle everything else I can. It’s difficult and not always achievable, but I continue to do my best.
The Fiction Factory 