LOST – Climate Action Exhibition and World Environment Day Events – Eden Court, Inverness May 15 – June 12
The allure of the dramatic coastline along the Coigach peninsula in Wester Ross attracts a steady stream of admiring visitors. But in that spectacular natural setting, looking towards the Summer Isles, what washes up on the shore is neither beautiful nor welcome. The receding tide dumps a grimy trail of discarded detritus, leaving a high water mark of plastic pollution that litters the littoral.
For artist Julia Barton, living only a few steps from the pounding waves and keen westerlies that often batter the North West coast, the piles of refuse – hardly a beachcomber’s delight – have been transformed into plastic art in a project she has devoted more than eight years to creating.
Much of the material is cast off from the essential economic activities that enable people to extract a living from the sea. Remnants of fishing nets, ropes and mussel pegs as well as domestic litter end up strewn along some of the most stunning west coast beaches in Scotland. But the problem is not confined to one area – the indestructible ocean flotsam lands on most reaches of Britain’s coast and everywhere else.
Julia, who engaged the support of coastal communities around the Highlands and as far as Shetland, gathers the waste plastic to be recycled as woven “LitterCUBE” sculptures which form the core of her latest installation, on view at Eden Court in Inverness until June 15.
Ironically there is an attractive aesthetic in the sculptural forms, playing with scale and the intrinsic colour of the plastics used.
The installation also includes examples of Julia’s experimental printmaking techniques utilising the impressions of the plastic items created on her press.
Projected onto the curved wall of the Eden Court Chapel exhibition space, a looped film hypnotically illustrates the symbolic flow of hundreds of litres of oil – the equivalent of the #LitterCUBES made from the variety of washed up plastic refuse – drinks bottles, rope, prawn boses, mussel pegs, cotton bud sticks, fishing line cord and scores of discarded fragments.
Much more than a creative whimsy, Julia’s Littoral Project is a serious long term venture where art and science combine to convey to those who participate and more importantly to a wider audience just what the mass of marine plastic represents. Crude oil and natural gas are the progenitors of plastics. In this epoch of climate emergency, the need to curtail our global dependence on fossil fuels is inextricably linked to our need to contain if not eliminate the proliferation of plastics that choke the planet – whether on land or sea.
Julia embeds a profound scientific message within her art-activist installation quantifying every drop of oil that has gone into producing plastics only to be jettisoned and washed up on the shore. The cubes vary in size and weight. The smallest are just 5 cm in length, but the 60 cm wide blocks are heaviest weighing nearly 23 kg – the equivalent of nearly 57 litres of oil alone, based on calculations using the environment consultants Circular Ecology database.
To ensure that environmental awareness and concern can be fun as well as informative, Julia stages community recycling workshops to produce skipping ropes from ocean plastic. In addition her own efforts to stem the tide of plastic pollution include a constructive solution drawing on the sea’s own natural elements. Julia, who organised the Isle Martin Seaweed Festival near Ullapool in September last year, is championing seaweed as an alternative biodegradable resource to the current agricultural feedstocks increasingly used to create bio-plastics. The plastics of the future may well come from the shores polluted by plastics of the present. – Neville Rigby
Julia Barton will lead a tour of the exhibition between 4-6 pm on Sunday June 5 – World Environment Day. She will be accompanied by Julien Moreau, lead researcher from Plastic@Bay, Durness, and Andy MacVicar from the GreenHive Workshop in Nairn, who will discuss ideas for recycling and community enterprise projects. Register for tickets here.
To mark World Ocean Day, Julia will lead a seaweed bio-plastics workshop at Cromarty on Wednesday June 8th (4-6 pm). The event is free and open to everyone. Location Cromarty Cinema Beach.