Things Connecting Up..…..Caterpillars.....
by Bernie Bell - 08:22 on 17 August 2025
Things Connecting Up…..
Some months ago I bought a card with an image by Sheenagh Patience….
https://uistarts.org/members-directory/#!biz/id/5cb4dad6f033bfe56f8c5198
.......entitled ‘Tectonic Plate Black’ – an image of pieces of ceramic made into the shape of a plate. As someone who collects bits of ceramic off the beach and brings them home, this appealed to me…...
The-Artist-Known-As Robinson R.R. has made a number of pieces using shards of plastic found on the beaches of Orkney including this one….
Ralph provides the following text to accompany the image…
“Browsing through the back catalogue...
'A visual poem made from Orkney beach-found plastic from the News to Orkney series of 2016 by Robinson RR. The Kaleidoscopic Crystalline Tears of the Green Man (After Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant). 85cms by 50cms.'
Yep, probably best viewed as an eco-poem.”
Recently, on his FB page, I saw an image of a piece by a friend of Ralph & Patty, Ida C. Helland-Hansen showing pieces of ceramic on a television satellite dish, now used as a garden sculpture……
Which is more complex but, to me, akin to the Tectonic Plates of Sheena Patience.
What comes to mind is….if Ralph used bits of plastic-off-the-beach to make plate shapes, as Sheenagh Patience does with ceramics - reinforcing/reiterating the ideas about all the plastic rubbish in the sea.
Plastic plates instead of ceramic plates - as so many plastic plates are used now, and thrown away. In England a ban on single-use plastic plates and cutlery was implemented in October 2023 to address the issue of plastic waste – but that leaves the rest of the world.
Ceramics aren’t so harmful as they break down to pieces which don’t float, and which creatures don’t tend to ingest.
This reminds me of when we were talking with a woman at Howton about why there’s not so many bits of ceramic and glass on the beaches as there used to be….
https://theorkneynews.scot/2021/01/01/a-short-mooch-at-howton/
Something of this here, too…
https://theorkneynews.scot/2022/03/30/cumbrae-memories/
Meanwhile, to quote from an email from Greenpeace…
"The latest round of UN Global Plastics Treaty talks has ended… without a treaty.
World leaders failed to reach an agreement, and once again, limits on plastic production - the most crucial step to ending the plastic pollution crisis - were blocked. But the good news is that a weak treaty wasn’t signed. Thanks to public pressure, many governments, including the UK, stood firm and refused to agree to a deal that would fail to tackle the harms caused by too much plastic.
There is still hope and the fight for a world free from plastic pollution goes on!
Over 234 fossil fuel and plastic industry lobbyists crowded the negotiations - outnumbering scientists by four to one! It’s clear these profit-hungry lobbyists must be banned from future rounds of negotiations."
https://action.greenpeace.org.uk/plastics-fossilfuels
Or do we drown in a sea of plastic?
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Caterpillars….
I was dead-heading a hardy geranium in one of our flower-beds, when I saw a caterpillar that I didn’t recognize. I called Mike to see, and he didn’t know what it was either.
We looked it up - it’s the caterpillar of a Knot Grass moth – and a very smart beast……
Mike was clearing the gravel round the half whisky barrel, and noticed the caterpillar of a White Ermine moth….
It’s the time of year for starting clearing up a bit in the garden – and for finding caterpillars!
https://theorkneynews.scot/2020/06/23/interesting-moths-supplemental/
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