Do you believe that raising awareness necessarily leads to an action? Can you see the impact of your work creating a shift in consciousness?
Absolutely. I receive telephone calls and emails from people week in week out.
I’m constantly receiving enquiries from people – particularly in the United States and also in Europe. These are people using the information I provide on my website for their studies, writing about my work in their theses, newspapers or magazines and the general questioning is along the lines of what you’re asking here.
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(I’ve included a selection of these articles and interviews at the end of my latest book on Environmental art which is seen and available for sale on my website).
These are people who have a genuine interest in what I’m doing and what effect I’m having on people through doing this work. I find it’s quite phenomenal. I’ve been told it’s quite profound the effect it has on the viewing public when people come to see an exhibition of mine.
I know people have experienced such profound effects that they’ve walked away in tears. Other people laugh because they get the sense of irony and humour in it at the same time. The work is very edgy.
On the one hand it talks about the problems of environmental degradation and the obviousness of it, if I can be collecting that amount of rubbish off beaches. There’s just so much of it and it brings people’s attention to this issue. People do learn from the work. Some people also ignore it, and discard it in their own mind as being something that their two-year-old could do.
When I used to walk along the beach to collect plastics to make art with I’d have people coming up to me and patting me on the back saying: “You deserve a medal.”
All I was doing was going on my morning walk, collecting my palette and the beaches were getting clean. I found all of that quite amusing it was really my daily meditation. At the same time I had people shouting at me: “Isn’t it just horrible what people do, throwing their rubbish on the beach!” and they’d really be in a big lather about this thing. In fact I had to ask one guy to quiet down as he was disturbing not only me but other early morning beach goers!
It’s the same when people look at the artworks. It’s not that I’ve become hardened to people’s reactions and responses to my work, but I realise they are just their reactions. One person can have a response on a totally different end of the scale to someone else. Somewhere along the way I’m encompassing it all by just producing the work.
