Sea of Oil and Trees

 Leaf Hall Fest

LEAF HALL COMMUNITY ARTS CENTER
Festival 2012. 21st July - 5th August.

THEME; MY EASTBOURNE

LEAF HALL Community Arts Center,51 Seaside,Eastbourne,E Sussex.

The Festival is now over, we had a brilliant two weeks. Many thanks to everyone who came along and supported us! Below are pictures of my installation and info for it.

Installation by Tania Long at Leaf Hall Festival.
The Sea of Oil and Trees – A Cry for our Oceans.

Much of the plastic packaging we throw away ends up in the oceans.
Walk along the beach and most of the flotsam you will see now is plastic.
 All the fish and sea creatures in my installation were made from household rubbish; packaging that tends to get thrown away by most people, which then ends up either in landfill, or in the sea!

Barracuda This large fish was made from sections of plastic milk bottle	Flying fish Made from Lucozade bottles
	Angler fish made from large lemonade bottle and plastic milk bottles, stuffed with tin foil
Full installation	Angler fish
Lobster Made from sections of plastic milk bottle and straws. This was the most complecated creature to make!	sea turtle Made from an aluminium pie dish and cardboard.
Bottle fish Fish made from a plastic water bottle.	Pie tin fish Made from aluminium pie pattypans
Seahorses Made from toothpaste tube boxes. The sea coral fan in background is a shredded sheet of cardboard.	Shoal of pattyppans and jelly fish Mobile of small fish made from aluminium tart tins. Jelly fish made from plastic trifle dish and cut up plastic bags
Doing the installation with help from Suesi Seedpod!

The Sea of Oil and Trees installation was dismantled and parts given away. It no longer exsists. Please contact me if you would like a similer installation for your gallery, hotel, shop or school. It will of course be built differently each time to fit the available space and or theme.

The discription that went with it is below:

A Cry for our Oceans

The ocean is the cradle of life, our life, and we are slowly choking her to death by our rampant consumerism and throw away attitude society.

Beach litter... at the highest level since records began
Litter is swamping our oceans and is washing up on beaches. It kills wildlife, looks disgusting, is a hazard to our health and costs millions to clear up.There are nearly 2,000 items of rubbish for every kilometre on a beach. Marine wildlife gets entangled in litter and accidentally ingests it. Turtles mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and the bags block their stomachs, often leading to death from starvation. Seabirds mistake floating plastic litter for food, and over 90% of fulmars found dead around the North Sea have plastic in their stomachs. Plastic litter on beaches has increased 135% since 1994.

Plastic never biodegrades. It just breaks down into small pieces but does not disappear. Microplastic particles are now found inside filter feeding animals and amongst sand grains on our beaches.
Litter comes from many sources - the public, fishing activities, sewage pipes and shipping, but it is all preventable.                                                   info from Marine Conservation site

Most plastic will not degrade for 1000 years.
Some will photo degrade and break down into small pieces. These are ingested by wildlife and enter toxins into the food chain, or sink to the bottom and choke sea plants.
Plastic bags kill sea turtles, seals and dolphins that eat them in mistake for jelly fish, or become entangled in them. Sea birds swallow crisp packets and get their beaks tangled shut with plastic rings from drink packs, thus starving to death.
There is a huge floating plastic slick in the Sargasso sea,made up mainly of plastic drinks bottles,destined to stay there and growing bigger every year.
60 million plastic bottles per day are thrown away in the United States and about 22 billion each year worldwide

Cardboard  and paper packaging costs millions of tons of trees a year.
Twenty nine million, eight hundred thousand trees (29,800,000) are cut down every day in the world.Processing the raw wood into packaging pours toxic wastes into the seas. Less than one 3rd of this one use packaging is recycled and that which is, along with recycled plastic, releases more toxins into the oceans via chemical processing.

Any rubbish we have can end up in the ocean.
Anything from toys to water bottles to plastic bags are out there floating around in the sea. Even cruise ships are allowed to dump their rubbish straight into the ocean as long as it is the size of a penny, or smaller. The rubbish is then eaten by an ocean animal, causes a blockage in that poor animals system, and then the animal dies. Another animal may eat the first one, ingesting the rubbish from the last one, die and so forth in a vicious circle.

Seas of garbage
Solid garbage also makes its way to the ocean. Plastic bags, balloons, glass bottles, shoes, packaging material - if not disposed of correctly, almost everything we throw away can reach the sea.
Plastic garbage, which decomposes very slowly, is often mistaken for food by marine animals. High concentrations of plastic material, particularly plastic bags, have been found blocking the breathing passages and stomachs of many marine species, including whales, dolphins, seals, puffins, and turtles. Plastic six-pack rings for drink bottles can also choke marine animals.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the world’s biggest floating landfill located in the Pacific Ocean. It stretches from the coast of California to Japan. Scientist believe that its larger in comparison to the biggest garbage dump on land. As plastic makes up 90 percent of debris floating in oceans, it causes problems for wildlife in the surrounding areas of the garbage patch. Researches have estimated that the plastic graveyard is twice the size of Texas.
“Plastic waste is one of the most significant sources of marine pollution. According to UNEP, plastic accounts for 90 percent of all debris floating in the oceans. That’s a real problem for animals who get their food there.” – Collin Dun

Why is this a concern?

The pollution from the ocean eventually comes back to humans within the food chain. Since plastic never degrades, the tiny plastic particles become a resource for food among marine mammals and sea birds, which later ends up in the food that we eat.
The best way to prevent the growing plastic patch in the Pacific Ocean is to
decrease our dependency on plastic. Do you reuse and recycle?