Rubbish!
How little do people care when they’re having fun?
Judging by an astonishing exhibition by the Sydney artist, Marina Debris, they don’t care at all. They don’t care when they’re working either, which was evidenced by the amount of professional fishing equipment gracing the created pieces. This exhibition was only the tail end of a much larger exhibition touring Australia.
We’ve all seen what plastic does to our precious marine life via documentaries and the media. But to see evidence of what floats in the sea in reality – it makes one’s heart break, especially when one has shared the sea with dolphins, seen whales and watched penguins waddle up the beach at dusk.
Doggy poo-bags, drink bottles, fishing equipment, children’s beach toys, plastic tubes, yoghurt containers, shopping bags, fishing nets, hooks, fishing line – much much fishing line.
It is a wickedly humorous exhibition, a scandalous exhibition, designed to prick our communal conscience and to fire our consciousness. It certainly pricked mine…
“It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.”
― The Sea Around Us (1951)
Words fail me …..
It was the dress made of plastic doggy bags that confounded me – and reminded me of how often I see doggy-doo left in the bags on the side of the beach with people too lazy to clip it to their dogleads and drop it in a bin on exiting the beach!
This is an awesome blog but a sad statement on our society in general…I guess it’s pretty hard to keep a small garbage bag in ones vehicle for trash disposal on the move or walk to a trash bin on the street or in a mall or ask a store employee where one is. Wouldn’t you just love to follow a litterer home and then toss some trash in their nice, clean living space to see how they react? I wonder how they would feel if their beloved cat or dog was wound up in a net/rope/garbage as those poor animals above and it injured or even killed them? People just don’t seem to see what’s right in front of them 🙁
Exactly! It frustrates me that so many folk on land and sea are choosing to be blind to what is happening. It frustrates me no end when I return from the supermarket to see the amount of plastic packaging I have to bin.
And just as bad or worse in the garden where every new purchase sits in a moulded plastic container or a plastic bag. There’s only so much recycling one can handle in a domestic garden. I said to my husband that we need to buy our fertilizers in bulk by the trailer load!
At least seeds come in paper envelopes.
It really frustrates me no end when I return from the supermarket to see the amount of plastic packaging I have to bin.
Absolutely John, it’s a disgrace.
Oh my word, I’m not sure I could stomach this, but what a great way of getting people’s attention!
Catherine, by making high fashion and seeing the detail and how much was in any one garment and knowing this was one artist’s collection around the NSW foreshores, one gets a stark reminder of what we, the human race, are doing to our seas. The sea is so important to me and this whole exhibition resonated, as hard as it was to see it. I just hope it does what it sets out to do – inform and activate a conscience.