The Ghost Below

We have been on quite a journey since our travels to Hong Kong in April. We have opened shows at the California Academy of Sciences, the Oakland Museum and the Marine Mammal Center. Whew!!! It has been hectic but we are rewarded that we have been asked to use our artwork to speak about the problem of plastic pollution in three such august Bay Area institutions.

In June we cast Indra's Net, an actual 40' x40' trawl net over the courtyard at TMMC. It is paired with the Ghost Net Monster in a dynamic dialogue about the problem of plastic pollution and ghost nets. And, thanks to an amazing team of folks from the Marine Mammal Center and the premier San Francisco ad agency Swirl, an online component of The Ghost Below  just launched.  With this virtual net we cast the net globally — extending the reach of our message. On the Marine Mammal website there is also an enhanced page describing The Ghost Below art installation with simple navigation and easy links. 

The Ghost Below is a call to let the imagination surface. What we don't know, what we deny has a powerful force once it's in the light of day. To make visible what we deny (here, the oceanic load of plastic--nets & trash) sparks new thinking about our problems so we may begin the task every artist knows "show-don't tell." The duty of the net (real and virtual) is to gather up the energy of promises and involvement. We feel the sea to be a source of nourishment both for the body and spirit—a great god in need of our collective propitiation. The ghost below can be a scary image, the unknown lurking. But in truth, it can be the source of creative imagination if we let it, honoring the mystery of what we don't know. 

We usually are a team of two. Our collaboration between us is from the "is you is, or is you ain't" school. Together the two of us can get quick turn-around but we now know, to work with so many voices, with Swirl and TMMC has brought light and richness to the depths of the ghost below. And, in the end, all the voices had impact and made for a super installation and now websites.

Full Circle

Thanks to Dan Rademacher, editorial director of Bay Nature, for his fine report about The Ghost Below.

Dan's neighbor is Beth Terry who has inspired us and so many others with myplasticfreelife

We dug deep through our photo archives to find these pics from March 22, 2010. We are quite competitive with the collecting - vying for who can find the "best" of the day. So you can imagine our feelings of avarice when Beth found this Oreo cookie from Hong Kong.

Yes, back then we did some internet searching but nothing came up. But today, just today,  LOOK an amazing find!!! 

In the astounding blizzard-y welter of plastic stuff here is this! A charm from a little girls bracelet or a key-chain dangle. Or maybe it was, as one website says, a Halloween novelty. But in the big picture, what could it mean that someone had an idea and went to the trouble to shape, make and market this little trifle. And, what will some future sleuth make of it? The holy communion wafer of the First Church of PVC?

On the Move

After the inaugural and successful launch of the Ocean Art Walk along the Stanley Waterfront in Hong Kong, we are happy to announce that all of the art has been moved to a new home, in front of the new Maritime Museum at Pier 8 in Central, Hong Kong. The art has been organized by Ocean Recovery Alliance and the Hong Kong Shark Foundation, with the exhibit showing art related to sharks, fishing and plastic pollution, all in a creative, colorful, fun way, to bring awareness about ocean protection.

Visit the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, Pier 8
May 10th – July 10th, 2013

Built for Speed

Although the show is called "Built for Speed" we've been working triple speed to get our contribution ready for the May 10 opening to the public. We are thrilled to be commissioned to create for the California Academy of Sciences three Ocean Action Stations to address three important issues related to ocean health: plastic waste, unsustainable fishing and wastewater pollution. It has been an incredible opportunity for us as artists to bring our vision and skills into the realm of science. 

 Ocean Action Station: Savvy with Seafood 

One of the special challenges has been to create labels for faux fish cans to address the problem of overfishing and importance of making wise seafood choices.

Ocean Action Station:  Clean Up the Flow

Ocean Action Station:  Pass on Plastic

Built for Speed at the California Academy of Sciences

Golden Gate Park

http://www.calacademy.org/built-for-speed/

May 10 - September 29

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Ocean Art Walk

After months of planning and hundreds of emails we FINALLY arrived in Hong Kong and were warmly welcomed by Doug Woodring, co-founder of the Ocean Recovery Alliance and organizer of the Hong Kong Ocean Film Festival and the Ocean Art Walk in Stanley Bay, HK. Thanks to Doug we spent an amazing 7 days in Hong Kong where we created and installed a group of artworks that will be on display at Stanley Bay, April 9-23. 

To really know a country the hardware store is THE place. It's where you can find out how people get things done. And in the case of Hong Kong, where there is no Home Depot- it can mean going way off-the-beaten path.  To really know a person you have to have gone the distance with them down narrow alley ways to hardware stores to find the right supplies to get the job done. Doug showed us the way so we are now writing the Lonely Planet Guide to Hardware Stores, HK.

Thanks to an awesome HK Ocean Art Walk team of volunteers who exemplified the famous proverb, Many Hands make light work, we were able to make quick work of over 2500 single-use bottles to create Water Lilies. We couldn't have done it without them. 

Richard Hill captured in time lapse the days of construction and installation. He compressed hours of work into a few short minutes. He made it look so easy.

On the walkway out to Blake's Pier we mounted Plastic Buffet, creating a corridor gallery to showcase our series of prints. Rather than paint or pencil we use shards of plastic as our medium. They become akin to strokes of paint on a palette. 

From the massive girders of  Blake's Pier we hung banners. On one side high-resolution images of plastic were super-imposed on a photograph taken in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in the North Pacific Gyre to symbolize the human impact we are having in even the most remote locations on earth. On the other side we presented our series Full Fathom Five inspired by Jackson Pollock's gigantic drip paintings. We tried to emulate his style using the fibers of fishing net and line. His "all over" composition lends itself to these pieces. Netting is indeed all over the planet's oceans. 

Net Man composed of old fishing nets collected from the fishermen in Aberdeen represents a character from the ocean, who comes out of the water to show his pleasure about the revival of the biodiversity of Hong Kong waters as a result of new controls on overfishing.  As a testimony to the resilience of the ocean, Net Man celebrates the healing forces of nature.

Net Man applauds efforts to bring awareness to the problems of intensive and unmonitored fishing, pollution, trawling, dredging and dumping that have had a negative impact on our marine environment.  He expresses the vision of healthier seas, safeguarding our marine ecology for future generations, by giving the ocean the breathing space needs to come back to life.

We are thrilled to be a part of such a grand endeavor to engage and educate visitors and passersby about the importance of the health of the oceans. We are thrilled to join forces with the other fine artists who contributed to the Ocean Art Walk. The press conference was a huge success with the artists and lots of reporters mixing it up.  South China Morning News posted a report. 

Although it seemed like we did nothing but work, Doug took good care of us, making sure that we enjoyed delicious fare from the sidewalk vendor and the famous Hong Kong hotpot.

And we even had one morning to do a walking tour exploring the shops close by our hotel.

Special thanks to the photographers who contributed to this blog post: Richard Hill, Wilson Tang, Kacie Wong, and Doug Woodring.

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The True Cost of Plastic

As a collaborative team, we have visited Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore hundreds of times to gather plastic debris washing out of the Pacific Ocean. In 2001 we presented our first findings in One Year, One Beach at Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station. We never imagined what would happen since that first exhibit, how picking up trash from the beach would become our life work. Since that first show, we have had over 50 exhibitions of our work. From the US Embassy in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia to the stage at Lincoln Center we have had incredible opportunities to show and share our work. Now until December 2013 at The Marine Mammal Center we have a 9' sculpture made from ghost nets taken from the stomach of a sperm whale. Opening June 1 we will have a permanent display in the new Cordell Bank area in the refurbished Natural Sciences at the Oakland Museum of California.

This year Gallery Route One is marking its 30 years dedicated to presenting exhibitions in a professional art space in a rural setting. We are so pleased that they have invited us back to celebrate.

Now some thirteen years later since our first GRO exhibition we are still energized by the task of picking up trash. The stuff keeps washing in and we continue to be challenged to find ways to communicate about the plastic tide. By carefully collecting and "curating" the bits of plastic, we fashion it into works of art that matter-of-factly shows, with minimal artifice, the material as it is. The viewer is often surprised that this colorful stuff is the thermoplastic junk of our throwaway culture. As we have deepened our practice we’ve found, like archeologists, that each tiny bit has a story to tell.

Of late we have turned our attention to a somber bit of plastic jetsam. Through the years we have amassed quite a collection of toy soldiers. Wracked by a long life at sea, some of the faces are gnarled, chewed on, abraded by the sand. When we looked into the tiny faces we were amazed by their expressions. Each soldier is a poignant reminder of the ravages of war and the extremes to which nations will go to preserve dominion over the petrochemical world.

In The True Cost of Plastic we will present large-scale photographs of toy soldiers, a re-enactment of a battle scene, and some of our rare and amazing pieces of plastic collected from Kehoe Beach.

March 22- April  28

Reception Sunday March 24, 3- 5 PM

Salon, Sunday, April 28 4-5 PM

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We are excited to announce that we will be artists in residence at the Rockport Center for the Arts, May 20-25 with a reception May 25. We will be creating a site specific installation from plastic collected from Gulf Coast beaches.