Roisin Markham

The artist prompt journey is developing; sharing, thinking, twiddling. One of those visual dialogues is between Emma and myself. The sea a connection, her practice ephemeral. Mine only really getting re-established after an imposed sojourn. Slowly my thoughts permeated into action. How might I respond to her lovely gift of words, sand, the introduction of sound, a small bone, colours and snips of things.

Since receiving her response to my #plenty2share artist prompt, my walks on the beach include her. A typical solitary practice I now have company. As I scan the shoreline for sea-glass, hag stones and holey shells I also look for small bones for Emma. I only know her briefly and yet there she is accompanying me, in my thoughts along the beach.

Old Bawn beach in south east of Ireland randomly shows off a skull, or larger animal bones even dead seals from time to time but seldom small bones. I wonder about her beach and the differences between the ecosystems, only divided by the edge of the Irish Sea and Georges Channel.

The beach at Old Bawn has an area of special conservation along the Cahore polders and canal. Little terns having nesting sites half way to the next beach. The teens dip and fish close by as I swim. I love being in the water watching them from the sea.

My experience of our shoreline forces me to deal with plastic pollution. Human discarded waste from food, toys, balloons and lots of packaging. Fishing industry waste is significant washed up nets, ropes and boxes. Plastic, plastic, plastic. Discarded, lost, it gets washed ashore in big and tiny lumps. Beach cleaning is ever present even though our beach would be considered clean. Occasionally the fishing plastic ends up in my pocket studio rather then in our bin.

In 2015 I exhibited during the Wexford Fringe Festival at the National Heritage Park. My textile artwork and exhibition explored presence, making 3D vessels, plastic pollution and sea plastic, I embedded the industrial fishing waste into the hand-felted 3D objects. The felted bowls were offered as meditation bowls. A way of reusing the plastic and giving it further purpose, it was also a request asking people to think about plastic in our seas. There was one blue lobster X octopus like sea creature with gnarled plastic felted tightly in, almost a toy.

My creative practice has as mentioned been on pause, the last 3 years purposely. The few years before involuntary change. I’ve been doing small things but not really trying to make art in any real or significant way. Late March that all kinda got turned on it’s head.

In the studio the weekend before last I was playing with paper glued to make a slightly malleable card. Rummaging on an old blog to reference something else I found a post from 2013 showing photos of me layering tissue paper, brown paper and a dress pattern, the making of that card. There has always been a theme of reuse in some of my work.

In the process of making (still not painting) something shifted. I had been using sea plastic for bundling artist prompts, it was on the desk. Pink, teal and white fishing rope discarded waste scuffed and no longer used for its original purpose, I unwrapped the rope. A thick plastic rope less then a foot long yields to a lot of yarn.

I began to think of the five #plenty2share requests that have come in the previous days. Two artist prompts and my inkling to respond to Emma.

For a while a holey shell or hag shell has been catching my eye. It got slung with wire; I thought about jewllery, jellyfish. It was n’t quiet right. So I left it hanging at the back of the easel over the desk I was working on.

Thinking about the permanence of plastic bothers me. How it effects our seas, the breaking down into micro/plastic and how that has found a way into all four corners of the earth. It makes me angry and I want people to think about it before they buy plastic. I’d like people to use their consumer choices to stop buying plastic and products wrapped in plastic. In terms of SDG goals it’s numbers 3, 9, 12, 13, 14 and 17.

How as an artist can I get people to think about these things?

I own my personal responsibility & actions; by trying to buy less plastic packaging, actively seeking out other options. After all I do most of our family shopping and make decisions on spending everyday.

I digress.

I battle with “are you just making that pretty” I want deeper meaning. Like a good conversation I’d like to make and share work that moves people, that they enjoy, that makes them think, that makes it imperative to take action. We are out of time and we have proved we can make dramatic changes quickly.

I think about the permanent presence of plastic pollution in our world.

So let’s see where these punctuations go.