Hello dirty beaches!
Going to Clarence House Garden Party tomorrow with a shopping trolley full of plastic debris and taking it on the train from Brighton. Watch this space. Lots of photos, updates coming soon...
Tangerine Confectionary, the Blackpool-based manufacturers of the Sherbert Fountain are abandoning the cardboard and paper tube and its iconic design for plastic. This they say will be more hygienic. Soggy paper and attempting to suck up fizzy sherbert through the liquorice straw will be a thing of the past.
These tactile memories will fade along with the joy of sticking your hand inside a KitKat paper wrapper and trying to burst it open, then running your finger down the tin foil wrapping and enjoying the slice and snap. Instead we'll have the benefits convenience, resealing and ease. How long will those memories last? "When I was a kid, the Sherbert Fountain was so hygienic and the resealing was so convenient" ............
Heinz baked beans are now available in plastic, one portion, snap pots, that you can throw into the microwave then simply dispose of the plastic container. Tate and Lyle golden syrup is no longer in its iconic tin, but a plastic squeezy bottle. These plastic updates just make my heart sink, not only because we're being told by the emergence of these 'developments' that opening a tin and heating on a pan is outmoded and slow, but because it's just more disposable plastic containers of a proliferation of designs that were sound, iconic and didn't incur the same environmental impact that plastic does.
Tangerine explained they had decided to redesign the packaging because "consumers wanted a more hygienic pack that can also be resealed". Stephen Joseph, Tangerine's chairman, said he hoped customers would realise that the new design closely mirrored the old. "I know it sounds a bit anaemic to say that we changed the packaging for hygiene reasons but it did need to be done. The new design keeps the sherbet much fresher and means the liquorice stick no longer pokes out of the top. I hope people won't mind too much and we have tried to redesign the new package to looks as much like the old one as possible." They start shipping the sweet in its new packaging next month.
Convenience is a very short sighted term for a product that will last forever within the environment. Leaving its legacy for generations to come. At first glance this collection of bright plastic toothbrushes, disposable lighters and bottle tops looks like a colourful mosaic. But astonishingly all these pieces were found in the stomach of a dead fledgling Laysan albatross. The stark image is on the cover of today's special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which highlights the effect plastic has on the environment and human health.
From Ant Farm at the Barbican to Richard Long at Tate Britain, eco-art is getting big ideas and moving beyond the medium to the message - Kate Muir
From The Times May 23, 2009
click here to see article in original format
Expect not merely a trend but a whole new wave: eco-art will be huge this summer. Once ecology was the preserve of the arty-farty-crafty green set, but now it is moving on to a bigger, bolder canvas.
From the Barbican to the Tate and café-galleries in the back lanes of Brighton, there is a backlash against Hirstian bling and a race to score political points. Preserving sharks in formaldehyde is over; the days of preserving sharks in the ocean are here. The Barbican is wading into the debate on our shifting climate and landscape with a mega-exhibition, Radical Nature — Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet, opening next month.
Railing against environmental degradation will be architects such as the Ant Farm collective and Richard Buckminster Fuller, and artists such as the tree-planting-obsessive Joseph Beuys. The exhibition, with 50 live events, is the first, claims the Barbican, “to bring together key figures across different generations who have created Utopian works and inspiring solutions for our ever-changing planet”.
Meanwhile Heaven and Earth, an exhibition of the 80 works of Richard Long, is at Tate Britain from June 3. This visionary landscape artist uses the landscape as a medium. He is famous for his extended, solitary walks through remote areas of Britain, or the wilds of Mongolia, when he marks the ground or adjusts natural features for photographs, sculptures and the sure-to-be-popular “large-scale mud wall”.
Of course, Land Art has been around for ever, and making sculpture with “found” objects is every art student’s cheap-as-chips salvation. Rubbish and excrement have never waned in popularity as useful tools, from Piero Manzoni’s fake tinned turds to Chris Ofili’s elephant dung and Mark Quinn’s self-made daubs. But the new eco-art movement is not merely about the medium, but the message too. The picture becomes clearer if we visit two eccentric eco-artists in Brighton whose work exemplifies the combative mood around the country. Their “Dirty Beach” exhibition does what it says on the tin. The environmental artist Lou McCurdy spent months gathering the detritus on Brighton beach, from plastic Toilet Duck bottles to orange nylon rope and the lost pink arms of Action Men.
Living on the coast, McCurdy became obsessed with the damage done by everlasting plastic to the oceans. She read about the trash vortex, a continent twice the size of Texas, made of discarded plastic shreds, floating endlessly in the North Pacific subtropical gyre, and she contacted the renowned marine biologist Richard Thompson, at Plymouth University. Thompson discovered that the sand on all our beaches contains gazillions of tiny grains of plastic, made small by the mechanical grinding of waves. The plastic attracts toxins and enters the food chain: “When they get as small as powder, even zooplankton will swallow them,” he says.
Those tiny plastic grains are known oddly as “mermaids’ tears” to scientists, and it was at this point that a second Brighton artist entered the campaign: Chloe Hanks, a graphic designer. By scraping away algae on rocks on the beach, Hanks was able to create “mermaids’ tears” graffiti. While McCurdy’s materials would last for ever, “like a throwaway plastic disposable lighter”, Hanks’s idea was to paint Banksy-style slogans on public buildings and even parked vans in Brighton. But all her “paint” would be biodegradable — “beetroot juice, moss, chalk, milk — I’ve tried the lot”, she says.
Thus Hanks’s works of art never lasted more than a few days, except in the photographs in the Dirty Beach shown in the gallery above Café Delice (continuing now after the Brighton Festival). When it snowed last winter, Hanks rushed down to the beach with stencils and flasks of boiling water. She strategically melted the snow until the message appeared in a cool typeface: “Under This Clean White Exterior, I’m a Right Dirty Beach.” The great work of protest endured for an afternoon, but it reached well beyond the middle-class gallery-going audience.
As the Dirty Beach project took on momentum, Hanks and McCurdy got fired up and last week they went to lobby Parliament with members of the Marine Conservation Society. “We both wore our Dirty Beach T-shirts, but we weren’t allowed in until we turned them inside out,” she laughs. “Political slogan, you know.”
At a photocall, the artists turned their T-shirts the right way round, revealing bras in the halls of Westminster as MPs fiddled their expenses in the background and the planet burnt.
Now that the scientists, and to some extent film-makers, have done the spade work on our ongoing destruction of the Earth, it’s the turn of artists to bring the issues upfront and in your face. There are 2,195 pieces of rubbish per kilometre on the average British beach, about half of which is dumped by the public. No artist can handle this alone.
We shall all be beached together unless we join the revolt. Not since Blue Peter brought us 101 uses of the yoghurt pot has trash been so fashionable.
Kate.muir@thetimes.co.uk
Poet Ted Hughes was incredibly well aware of the environmental impact we were having, and was writing, noting and campaigning from the late 50s. "As early as 1957, living in America with Sylvia Plath, he was writing to his sister, Olwyn, on the industrialisation of food production. 'Everything is in cellophane. Everything is 10,000 miles from where it was plucked or made.' Fifty years on, food miles and carcinogens in cellophane are hot environmental topics."
"Becoming poet laureate in 1984 gave Hughes a grander platform from which to campaign. He would also use his position to raise difficult questions about the state of the environment with the Thatcher government, then in the process of privatising the water authorities. The first poem he wrote in his new post was about the rivers of Devon he was fighting so hard to defend, 'Rain-Charm for the Duchy, A Blessed, Devout Drench for the Christening of His Royal Highness Prince Harry'. In an unpublished letter to his friend the academic Keith Sagar, he expressed satisfaction at the flutter of agitation the poem caused among Devon local councils, alarmed at the references to water quality smuggled into the verse.
'These are the perks,' Hughes wrote, before quoting a scathing stanza dedicated to the Torridge that he cut from the published poem. 'And the Torridge, that hospital sluice of all the doctored and scabby farms from Welcombe to Hatherlea to Torrington/ Poor, bleached leper in her pit, stirring her rags, praying that this at last is the kiss of the miracle.'"
On radio four recently we caught a quote from Ted Hughes - "everything you drink ends up in your cup of tea". Something that scientists at Plymouth University are finding is very true as plastic particles are being found in the tiniest of organisms.
Hanks and McCurdy transient drawing in the sand
"everything you throw away ends up in your cup of tea:"
New Beach, Shoreham-by-sea
Around 50 students form Central St. Martins visited the exhibition and chatted with us. It was really great to talk about our work, have some other opinions and just a good chat about the work
Lou and Chloe went to Parliament to Lobby their MPs - Des Turner and Celia Barlow. The Day was alright - not much press which was a shame. Speakers Martin Slater MP and Huw Irranca-Davies MP were very positive and we did as expected and lobbied our MPs, pointing out the importance of the Marine and Coastal Access Bill going through and the largely linguistic changes that needed to be made to make it really effective. Despite there being no media presence, even though it was an event organised by RSPB, WWF, Wildlife Trusts and Marine Conservation Society, there were more than 250 there from across the country to lobby their MPs.
More interestingly we were stopped by security from going into Parliament wearing our Dirty beach T-shirts, as they were seen to be 'campaigning' and had to go into a room and turn them inside out. Once inside Parliament, Celia Barlow called for a photo shoot and suggested Lou turned her T-shirt back the right way round - this meant a bit of bra flashing.
On Wednesday, May 13, we have been invited by The Marine Conservation Society to go to Parliament and lobby our local MP's. This is in an endevour to 'Make the Marine Bill Count'. The Marine and Coastal Acess Bill is currently making it's way through the House of Lords and will begin its passage through the House of Commons within weeks. Whilst is existence at all is a cause to celebrate, there are some sections that are not as strong as they need to be. That's what we will all be trying to impress.The parliamental lobby will be represented by the Marine Conservation Society, The Wildlife Trusts, the RSPB and the WWF.
For more information about the Marine and Coastal Access Bill follow these links:
http://www.defra.gov.uk/marine/legislation/
http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2008-09/marineandcoastalaccess.html
http://www.politics.co.uk/legislation/environment-and-rural-affairs/marine-and-coastal-access-bill-$1245109.htm
We were really pleased and excited to have author Michael Morpurgo drop by to the exhibition last Saturday, following his talk at the Brighton Festival.
Lou and Chloe will be in Cafe Delice at the exhibition (40 Kensington Gardens, Brighton) every Saturday during May to talk about the work, give supporting information from Marine Conservation Society, Surfers Against Sewage and also to sell 'Dirty Beach' T-shirts and bags - must haves for all Fringe Festival goers!
The private view was an amazing night. Thanks to all who came, we'd really like an end of show party too!
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