Following the success of our glass bottles, The Seven Stages of Degradation (shown at the Royal Academy Summer show and other exhibitions, see the other post), and the prototype ‘Ghostnet Chandelier’ at the London Design Festival 2018 (see this post too), this installation piece continued to develop our ideas around the theme of ocean plastic. Working with Louis Thompson once again and with hand-blown glass and waste glass fragments, found ocean plastic from Hawaii and other beaches around the world and recovered ghost nets this piece references the chaotic beauty of an entangles ghost net being pulled out from the deep ocean. These hand-crafted colourful objects represent a horrific future that our Anthropocene age threatens to leave behind if we do nothing about our dependency on plastic and its easy disposability.
Marine litter is one of the clearest symbols of a resource inefficient economy. These objects that litter our beaches and impact our environment should be captured for their value before the reach the seas and create problems, but this currently does not happen at the scale required. Adopting a more circular approach, which puts emphasis on; designing systems that prevent waste and encourage recovery of valuable materials, designing products that use materials that can easily be recycled and reused, and simplifying the use of plastics, especially in packaging would be the most effective solution for marine litter.
The plastic fragments used in this series were collected in 2014 on a trip to Kamilo beach, Hawaii. This remote beach (also known by the locals as Trash Beach) sees the results of the global plastic waste tragedy wash up onto its shore every day on every tide. The amount of plastic-to-sand ratio is shocking. Everywhere you look plastic is present, deep in the fabric of the beach and seemingly almost impossible to extract. Everything picked up had a story; a journey from Japan after the Tsunami or from the landfills of the USA. There are snatches of words on bottles bleached by the sun. Some plastic had been in the sea under the hot UV sun so long it turned to powder when touched.
Using these fragments along with images of microplastic swirling around the ocean gyres as inspiration the pair created work using waste glass to illustrate this chaos and intrusion into the natural environment. The creation of each vessel starts with picking a plastic ocean waste fragment to inform the shape.
This is followed by a process of gathering and adding waste glass, shaping and blowing. Some of the waste shards are engraved and enamelled with illustrations of seas, nets and packaging details. The piece is completed by the addition of the original plastic piece.
Using images of fragments of plastic swirling around the ocean gyres as inspiration these large vessels use waste glass fragments to illustrate their chaos and intrusion into the natural environment. The creation of each vessel starts with picking a plastic ocean waste fragment that will inform the shape. This is followed by a process of gathering and adding waste glass, shaping and blowing. Some of the waste shards have been engraved and enamelled with illustrations of nets, seas and ships. The piece is completed by the addition of the original plastic piece.
These smaller hand-blown glass bottles have waste glass fragments melted into the surface, clinging on like the barnacles attached to floating plastic in the gyres. Pieces of the waste glass are etched and enamelled with illustrations of ocean currents and fragments of nets. Each piece has a bottle top recovered from oceans around the world referencing the bottle’s once useful life.
The work was shown all together in a large installation called Broken Ocean at the 2019 Collect Open. Broken Ocean used nearly a ton of salvaged ghost nets, pulled out of the ocean by Surfers Against Sewage and represented the rubbish truckload of plastic that enters our oceans every minute. The installation won the prestigious Collect Open award.
wasted talent 