The Tears of Amphitrite
This series, The Tears of Amphitrite, looks at the effect that our consumer choices are making on the marine environment, through the ever-growing mass of discarded plastic that flows from our terrestrial home to an oceanic grave.
In this work, I have re-constructed pictures by earlier artists, both painters and photographers, to create new representations of the marine plastic problem.
In the title photograph, Amphitrite (Ἀμφιτρίτη, the Greek goddess of the sea), weeps tears of plastic for her despoilt realm.
The still life paintings of the 17th century Dutch “Golden Age” coincide with the first time in history in which a growing wealthy middle class, as well as the ruling aristocracy, had sufficient mony to spend on luxury goods. This period thus marks the beginning of the consumer society, a society which today consumes so much stuff, that even the materials in which our purchases are packed have become a major environmental problem.
The first book to be published using photographic illustrations was Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843). Atkins used the recently invented cyanotype process to make photograms of marine algae specimens that she found on her local beaches. For the pictures below, I have used the same technique, but the living specimens have been replaced by specimens of a man-made origin: plastic waste.
