Broken Ocean
The work was shown all together in a large installation called Broken Ocean at this year’s Collect Open. Broken Ocean used nearly a ton of salvaged ghost nets, pulled out of the ocean by Surfers Against Sewage and represented the rubbish truckload of plastic that enters our oceans every minute. The piece won the prestigious Collect Open award.
Working with different media to talk about current issues can create arresting outcomes. The collection of pieces from the collaboration between creative campaigner, Sophie Thomas and Glass artist, Louis Thompson mixes the media of hot glass and found ocean plastic to highlight Marine plastic pollution. Working with hand blown glass and waste glass fragments with found ocean plastic from Hawaii and other beaches around the world, these hand-crafted colourful pieces represent a horrific future that our Anthropocene age threatens to leave behind if we do nothing about our dependency on plastic and its easy disposability into our natural environment.
Marine litter is one of the clearest symbols of a resource inefficient economy. These objects that litter our beaches and impact our environment should be captured for their value before the reach the seas and create problems, but this currently does not happen at the scale required. Adopting a more circular approach, which puts emphasis on; designing systems that prevent waste and encourage recovery of valuable materials, designing products that use materials that can easily be recycled and reused, and simplifying the use of plastics, especially in packaging would be the most effective solution for marine litter.
The plastic fragments used in this series were collected by Sophie in 2014 from Kamilo beach, Hawaii. This remote beach (also known by the locals as Trash Beach) sees the results of the global plastic waste tragedy wash up onto its shore every day on every tide. The amount of plastic-to-sand ratio is shocking. Everywhere you look plastic is present, deep in the fabric of the beach and seemingly almost impossible to extract. Everything picked up had a story; a journey from Japan after the Tsunami or from the landfills of the USA. There are snatches of words on bottles bleached by the sun. Some plastic had been in the sea under the hot UV sun so long it turned to powder when touched.
Using these fragments along with images of microplastic swirling around the ocean gyres as inspiration the pair created work using waste glass to illustrate this chaos and intrusion into the natural environment. The creation of each vessel starts with picking a plastic ocean waste fragment to inform the shape. This is followed by a process of gathering and adding waste glass, shaping and blowing. Some of the waste shards are engraved and enamelled with illustrations of seas, nets and packaging details. The piece is completed by the addition of the original plastic piece.
Louis Thompson MA RCA is an acclaimed glass artist winning numerous awards and commissions and he has been invited to create installations for various museums and international exhibitions. His work has been exhibited extensively at galleries in the UK, Europe, Japan and the USA.
