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.” 
― Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (1951)