MILAN – Imagine that you have before you a sculpture, where the main figures are two life size whales swimming through an ocean of 70,000 plastic bottles. It is not a dream; you are in fact in Bristol, a city in the south-west of the UK and Europe’s first “Green Capital”. The work is called “The Bristol Whales”, an art installation built by Cod Steaks with the aim of highlighting the threat of the pollution of the ocean.
The sculpture
The work, entitled “The Bristol Whales”, is aimed at raising awareness of the pollution of the ocean. Made from willow gathered in Somerset, the sculpture weighs six tonnes and portrays two whales swimming through an ocean of 70,000 plastic bottles, collected at the Bristol Half Marathon and Bristol 10 km race. On a global scale, around eight million tonnes of plastic end up in the sea every year, equivalent to the bodyweight of 45,000 blue whales.
Whales as a symbol of the environment
Sue Lipscombe, CEO of Cod Steaks, declared: ”Whales are intelligent creatures, beautiful and charismatic. They have become symbols for the world’s oceans. They have enormous physical strength, but also represent resilience, the capacity to bounce back, provided that those in charge of the oceans take the right steps to protect them. We are sure this sculpture will fuel discussion and debate over the plastic in the ocean”. The chief trustee of the Project Earth artists (APE), Herbert Girardet also expressed his opinion on the topic: "Pollution is only one example of the enormous damage we are causing to the marine environment. We are killing creatures, poisoning the food chain and suffocating the sea bed”.
by editorial staff
