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UNIT 204 - Human Impact on Species and
Environment
"In this unit you must produce a photographic essay
which represents the interaction between human development and
natural systems."
Artefacts of Blue Plastic
“What is blue? Blue is the invisible becoming
visible....Blue has no dimension. It is beyond the dimensions of
which other colours partake”
Yves Klein
ar·te·fact1
1) An object produced or shaped by human craft,
especially a tool, weapon, or ornament of archaeological or
historical interest.
2) Something viewed as a product of human conception or agency
rather than an inherent element: “The very act of looking at a naked
model was an artifact of male supremacy” (Philip Weiss).
3) A structure or feature not normally present but visible as a
result of an external agent or action, such as one seen in a
microscopic specimen after fixation, or in an image produced by
radiology or electrocardiography.
4) An inaccurate observation, effect, or result, especially one
resulting from the technology used in scientific investigation or
from experimental error: The apparent pattern in the data was an
artifact of the collection method.
The initial impetus for this project grew quite naturally out of the
work I did for the previous unit, 203, both in terms of the image
making process and subject matter. I decided again to make a
collection, this time of manmade rubbish as opposed to natural
detritus and to use the individual elements in combination to create
an image or series of images. My initial idea was to select a
section of beach and collect every manmade item and arrange and
classify the resulting material according to function, type,
material and so on. I very quickly decided that a more interesting
(and more practical) collection could be made by choosing just one
class of objects as a representative sample, so I chose plastic and
specifically blue plastic.
Blue as a pigment is rare in nature which is one of the reasons it
acquired value, to artists and bower birds alike. Ultramarine,
deriving from lapis lazuli from “beyond the sea” in Afghanistan, was
second only to gold in intrinsic and by extension moral (or other)
value and was therefore reserved for the most important parts of a
painting specifically, in religious art (which is all the art there
was at one time), for the cloak of the Virgin Mary. Blues of lesser
value would be used to represent distance and of course the sky,
thus blue became and to some extent remains, associated with both
“the good” and “the pure” as well as the ethereal void. Both of
these associations provide the context for Yves Klein’s monochrome
paintings using the intense ultramarine pigment he patented as
International Klein Blue.2
The use and meaning of blue in art was one layer of meaning I wanted
to reference. Blue has a host of often contradictory associations
and meanings (see logbook) but one of the most intriguing and the
possible reason for it being most people’s favourite colour, is its
lack of meaning or neutrality. Blue is almost a default colour since
others are often loaded with very specific associations and
meanings. To choose blue is to make a non-statement. Blue is safe.
This may be why a majority3
of plastic objects found on beaches are blue.
From previous experience (I’ve always had a penchant for amateur
beachcombing) I knew that large quantities of coloured plastic, with
a predominance of blue, can be picked up from most beaches. It gets
there, for the most part in one of two ways, washed up from the sea
or brought there by visitors and either discarded or lost. As Paul
Theroux points out4 the
coast is where all the stuff unwanted inland - nuclear power
stations, military ranges, sewage - gets shoved but the beach gets
it from all sides with a percentage of material lost or discarded
from ships or otherwise washed into the sea ending up there also.
Thus a range of objects from the obviously marine in origin, to the
ubiquitous drinks bottle cap, to plastic starfish, to simple
everyday rubbish ends up on beaches. Today’s rubbish is tomorrow’s
archaeology, thus my “finds” would form some sort of picture
(literally and figuratively) of the state of the society which
produced them.
The use of found objects has a long tradition in art from Dada to
Arte Povera, which I wanted to both reference and to borrow from.
The sculptor Tony Cragg in particular has used found coloured
plastic to create images such as View of Britain from the North5.
My The Great Wave self consciously references this work as well as,
I would hope, developing the idea and of course my work is a two
dimensional photographic image not a sculpture. I believe that
originality in art, for its own sake, is grossly over rated, not
just in a death-of-the-author sort of way but in the way that
science (and perhaps even more, technology) builds upon the work of
others. You don't find Einstein saying, "Better not work on gravity,
that was Newton's thing." Knowledge grows by taking what we think we
know and testing it in new ways. Art should be the same. Obviously
re-inventing the wheel is a waste of time but making a better wheel
is not.
We have been producing plastics in significant quantities now for
the last 40 years as my own sampling has shown6
a lot of this ends up on beaches if, it didn't break down reasonably
quickly our beaches would be knee deep in the stuff by now. The
mechanical action of the sea in combination with exposure to light
and varying temperatures breaks plastic down quite rapidly into
smaller and smaller fragments but that is not the end of the story.
Recent research7 has shown
that microscopic fragments of plastic can be found in tidal
sediments. The plastic does not disappear it just gets smaller. Most
plastics are largely resistant to biodegradation and are thought to
be likely to remain in the environment for hundreds of years. Larger
fragments have been found in the digestive tracts of many marine
organisms from sharks to fulmars and the deleterious effects of
these is reasonably obvious. What effect micro-plastics may have,
especially on micro-organisms is still unknown, though studies8
have shown that filter feeding organisms such as lugworms rapidly
accumulate plastics if exposed to such sediments which may have a
similar choking effect. Plastic as a material is relatively inert
though additives such as bactericides are not. Even so called
biodegradable plastics remain in the environment in micro-fragments
once the starches which hold the plastic molecules together have
broken down. Part of the “message” of this project then was to
highlight this issue.
Though the dangers of the accumulation of plastic in the environment
may be unknown, the amount can only continue unless some solution is
found. Remedial action may be taken such as beach cleaning and the
side effect of my project has been to remove a small amount of
(blue) plastic from the marine environment. Until truly
biodegradable plastics can be developed or we stop using plastics
altogether, recycling is probably the best answer. My project
provides a kind of metaphor for recycling - in this case recycling
rubbish as art.9
The images I have made for this project form a group which is
intended to be seen together with each image or type of image
informing and enriching the others. Thus the varying means I have
used to create them - "straight" photography, Photoshop collage,
joiner - are as much a part of the work as the images themselves.
The project is about the means of representation and how that
effects what is represented as much as it is about what is being
represented. Meaning becomes an artefact, in the other senses of the
word, of representation.
The Hours
This relates to the "artefact" series (see below) but also stands
alone as an individual image. A large percentage of the intact blue
plastic objects found tend to be bottle type containers, Their
original content, as far as it can be determined by recognition or
identifying labels and other graphics, ranging from domestic bleach,
to transmission fluid, to oil, to salt, is predominantly chemical in
nature. Blue bottles were traditionally used for poisons and
medicines, so the link with the idea of poisoning the environment
might be made but the semiotics of colour are far more subtle. In a
sense blue is the default colour, since other colours tend to have
very specific meanings. What would bleach in a red bottle say? Blue
is as close to neutral as you can get. The colour of an object can
vary in three ways - hue, saturation and tone - so theoretically
each object could be placed in a unique position in three
dimensional colour space but here I have arranged my blues along a
one dimensional axis, going roughly from dark to light. This
arrangement, as in all these images, is intended to have a number of
meanings. The first is simply about imposing an order on a group of
objects which are linked only by their colour, material and the
location they were collected. This order however relates further to
the colour of the sky and of the sea and to the whole idea of the
visible spectrum of light. Light is actually destructive to pigments
but the blues are the most resistant to such fading, printed
material exposed to sunlight soon looses its yellow and magenta,
fading to cyan, blue is what is left at the end. It just so happened
that I used 24 bottles to create this image, such numerical
serendipity should not be ignored, so the title “The Hours”
suggested itself with its association with not only the passage of
time, one bottle per hour accumulating on a beach somewhere, for
example, but also books of hours such as the Trés Riche Heures du
Duc de Berry describing the passage and occupations of the
seasons; painted by the Brothers Limbourg they also made great use
of the colour blue.
The Great Wave
This title refers not only to Hokusai's famous image of the sea
which, given recent events, has acquired a resonance of
environmental anxiety but also to Simon Patterson's reworking of the
London underground map which he called The Great Bear, which
similarly explored the re-contextualisation of information. My
reworked map is based on one of Morecambe Bay, appropriate as most
of the material was collected from Lancastrian beaches, though any
area of sea could have been used. The visual reference is to the
sea-chart where, unlike the majority of maps, the land is left
largely blank as being of lesser importance. Blue is conventionally
used to represent water, though in reality, like air, water has no
intrinsic colour; rather it is the scattering of light, by particles
suspended within it and to some extent by the water particles
themselves, which give it its colour. Like the sky, the more of it
there is the more blue is scattered the darker the blue. Therefore
tonality forms a natural index of water depth which I have
represented by using darker and lighter items of plastic to indicate
where shallower and deeper water might exist. I have include a scale
(not actually to scale) to reinforce the map idea. For the same
reason I took a one pixel wide sample of a section of the "map" and
expanded it. This refers to two things: the idea of a key, where
colours represent differentiated areas of depth, elevation, land
use, political boundaries and so on and the idea of a longitudinal
section such as appears on a geological map. The lack of any actual
information or numerical values for the scale or key is deliberate
as it leaves the viewer free to decide what is being represented.
The blue plastic items also, of course, represent themselves. The
image works at A3 but is intended to be seen on a larger scale,
ideally at life size for the component parts. The full version of
this image is 131 x 94 cm which, at 874.6mb, is larger than the
capacity of a CD to hold and even that was a scaled down version of
the 4GB+ image which I could have created if I had used the digital
files which make up the image at their original size, however that
would have exceeded the capacity of my computer's memory to open.
Dead Sea
The title refers to Paul Nash’s painting Totes Meer, often
known as “sea of dead planes” with which I found echoes in a number
of the images I'd produced on a visual and emotional level. (In fact
almost all of the titles I have chosen could apply to any of the
images in this project.) As in all of these images the message is
not simply about environmental pollution, my attitude to “human
impact on species and environment” is far more equivocal than the
attitude of environmental gloom which has become so prevalent. I
believe that pessimism is one of humanity’s greatest enemies I also
believe in the power of human intelligence and ingenuity to solve
many of the environmental problems which face us, given the will to
do so. I wanted to communicate the idea that order, meaning and
beauty might be created out of chaos, meaninglessness and ugliness.
Dead Sea is a joiner in the David Hockney tradition. I had toyed
with the idea of calling it In at the deep end or something similar
to suggest a visual similarity with a swimming pool.
Artefacts #1-7
These images, designed to be seen as a group, are a kind of faux
archaeological record as indicated by the use of a scale, which is
roughly accurate. As in real archaeology finds can be classified in
all sorts of ways. Here I have grouped objects together which have a
similarity of function - pegs, forks, Frisbees, bits of spade - or a
structural similarity - lattice, teeth and bristles. The most
interesting objects are those which have an obvious human connection
and of those, the representational objects are the most highly
prized of all. I have deliberately not given a specific title to
each group to allow the viewer to make the connections between the
objects themselves and to make their own deductions about how and
why the objects ended up on a beach. The title “artefacts” which I
have also used as a general title for the project has several
possible meanings: referring to the manmade objects which comprise
the work but also to the idea of some meaning arising out of the way
something is represented which is not necessarily intrinsic to that
thing.
Triptych, Bower #1 and #2
I wanted to make some images which were “straight” photographic
representations of the material I’d collected but which might also
be suggestive of other interpretations. The Satin Bower Bird,
Ptilonorhynchus violaceus, of Australia and New Guinea has a
particular preference for blue objects with which it decorates its
bower in order to attract a mate. The plumage of the bird itself has
a blue sheen so the collection of blue objects is a kind of
metonymic extension of itself. Blue is (or was) rare in the bird’s
habitat and the accumulation of an impressive display of blue
flowers, berries and so on was an index of the bird’s fitness. With
the increasing availability of manmade blue objects the male’s task
has ironically become harder since, although blue objects are easier
to find, it has to collect more of them to maintain a competitive
edge over rival males.
When it was discovered that the discarded rings from 2 litre milk
bottle caps were dangerous to the bower bird as they could get
caught around its neck the manufacturers changed the colour.
1
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=artefact
2 It is in fact the binding
medium, a special formulation of ether and petroleum extracts, which
he developed in collaboration with Edouard Adam his paint supplier,
which gives IKB its intense brilliance and saturation by preserving
the quality of the raw powdered pigment. This does not survive
reproduction nor concealment behind Perspex, as suffered by the
Klein painting in Tate Modern, though the touchable velvety surface
of his works makes such a precaution understandable.
3 A majority over any other
single colour.
4 In Kingdom by the Sea
5 At Tate Modern
6 I collected 5 large bin
bags full from just 3 main locations and that was just the blue
plastic.
7 THOMPSON,
Science 2004
8 Ibid
9 In the long term I may
continue to collect blue plastic material to eventually be used in a
three dimensional work.
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