My host and I seem to have developed a routine whereby I greet visitors to MVV (aka the incinerator) as they arrive and show them around the exhibition while they have coffee before their official tour of the premises. I will be repeating this on 3rd May and this will also mark the end of the exhibition at this location as I will be taking it down after the visit.
An enthusiastic informed group they provided feedback on the thumbnail sheets for each image and in the visitors book. While I was once again asked how I got inside a bottle bank I was also given advice about selling the plastics images by one of the group who happened to be a professional photographer. Framed and in a smart London gallery he could see there might be a market. An interesting discussion followed about my aims and whether I had succeed in making the images too beautiful for viewers to realise what my intentions are. This is a key issue I have been challenged with since using the scanning methodology with the debris.
Not labelling the images to encourage viewers to question them coupled with having some of the items present as well as myself to explain the aims of the project has emerged as the way to ensure the narrative is heard and understood. This is clearly an area for me to work on.
I have recently inspired by Hanks and McCurdy’s ‘Dirty Beach’ installations and Katie Paterson’s project work with a grain of sand and representations of time and space to raise awareness of what we are doing to our planet (Paterson 2010; Larsen 2016). Learning more each day about the problems with plastics, the research on what factors drive behaviour change is an area to investigate in relation to the development of my project in the future ((e.g. Hawkins 2005; Pahl, Wyles & Thompson 2017; Pahl & Wyles 2016).
References
HANKS, Chloe & Lou MCCURDY. ‘Dirty Beach’. Available at: http:// http://www.dirtybeach.node.uk.com/exhib11.html [accessed 24/04/19].
HAWKINS, Gay. 2005. The Ethics of Waste: How we Relate to Rubbish. Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield.
LARSEN, Lars Bang. 2016. ‘Astronomy Domine. The Anthroplogical-Cosmological Squeeze in Katie Paterson’s Work’. [essay]. Available at: http://2017.katiepaterson.org/ wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Katie_Paterson_Lars_Bang_Larsen_essay_2016.pdf [accessed 27/04/19].
PATERSON, Katie. 2010. ‘Inside this Desert Lies the Tiniest Grain of Sand’. Available at: http://katiepaterson.org/portfolio/inside-this-desert/ [accessed 27/04/19].
PAHL, Sabine, K. J. WYLES. and Richard C. THOMPSON. 2017. ‘Channelling passion for the ocean toward plastic pollution’. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(10), 697-699.
PAHL, Sabine & K. J. WYLES. 2016. ‘The human dimension: how social and behavioural research methods can help address microplastics in the environment’. Analytical Methods, 9, 1404-1411.
Sarah Newton Photography 