SOUP

SOUP is a description given to plastic debris suspended in the sea, and with particular reference to the mass accumulation that exists in an area of the North Pacific Ocean known as the ‘Garbage Patch’. The image SOUP: Bird's Nest aims to engage with, and stimulate, an emotional response in, the viewer by combining a contradiction between initial aesthetic attraction and social awareness. All the plastics photographed have been salvaged from beaches around the world and represent a global collection of debris that has existed for varying amounts of time in the world's oceans. The captions record the plastic ingredients within each image, providing the viewer with the realisation and facts of what exists in the sea.

Beyond Drifting

Beyond Drifting highlights current scientific research that plankton are ingesting microplastic particles at the base of the food chain. In this series, unique ‘specimens’ of these animal species relate to the pioneering discoveries made by naturalist J.V. Thompson in Cobh/Cork harbour during the 1800s. Presented as microscopic samples, objects of marine plastic debris, recovered from the same location, mimic Thompson's early scientific discoveries of plankton.

Presenting new ‘specimens’ created from recovered debris, serves as a metaphor for the ubiquity of plastic and for the Anthropocene, encapsulating in miniature the much larger problem of an imperfect world.

This project starts in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Covering between 700,000 and 15 million square kilometers, the site is a monument to plastic waste on a global scale. Referring to Kantian aesthetics, it is a truly ‘sublime’ kinetic sculpture built by all the nations around the Pacific Ocean through many years of mindless, unsustainable consumption. As environmental activist, and discoverer of the Trash Vortex, Captain Charles Moore boldly claims, ‘the ocean has turned into a plastic soup’. From primordial soup to plastic soup, An Ecosystem of Excess asks a very simple question: ‘If life started today in our plastic debris filled oceans, what kinds of life forms would emerge out of this contemporary primordial ooze?’

The project introduces pelagic insects, marine reptilia, fish and birds endowed with organs to sense and metabolize plastics as a new Linnean order of post-human life forms.