Shells, feathers, unusually smooth stones, a pansy shell if you were incredibly lucky ... these were the small treasures that we used to stuff into our pockets as children, later to be discovered by our moms rhythmically destroying the washing machine.
When Dutch artist Thirza Schaap walks the beach, she also picks things up. These days, this ocean flotsam and jetsam is much more likely to be toothbrushes, bottle tops, shopping bags, flip-flops and bits of plastic whose original purpose is anybody’s guess.
Cowrie shells have been replaced with Coca-Cola lids, pansy shells with bath plugs on rusty chains. Seaweed washes up growing bits of nylon net, and cuttlefish skeletons are found among bits of coloured plastic.
In After the Tide, Schaap’s solo exhibition at Berman Contemporary All Women Art in Cape Town, she turns this depressing haul into something strangely beautiful. Running until 28 November, the exhibition continues the artist’s long-running preoccupation with the rubbish washing onto the world’s coastlines, particularly through her Plastic Ocean project.
Schaap, who divides her time between Amsterdam and Cape Town, collects the debris, cleans and sorts it, then arranges it into sculptural still lifes: strange flowers, vessels and marine creatures that look like they’ve been dredged from a fashionable coral reef.
She photographs them against pale backgrounds and in clear natural light. The results are graphic, witty, sometimes beautifully moving. Look once and you’ll see a carefully composed arrangement. Look again and you’ll realise you’re admiring sea rubbish.
Though we’re painfully aware of the scale of plastic pollution in our oceans, we’ve become, by necessity, kind of immune to another photograph of a turtle entangled in plastic or a beach buried in bottles. We can look at images like these, feel dreadful and move on.
Sometimes making the ugly beautiful is a way of holding the attention. “I try to evoke an emotional response from my audience by creating a contradiction,” Schaap says, describing the collision between “initial aesthetic attraction” and the subsequent realisation of what these objects actually represent.
In After the Tide, she also returns to one of art history’s oldest tricks: the still life. In the vanitas tradition, particularly associated with 17th-century Dutch painting, artists used wilting flowers, rotting fruit, skulls and other symbols of decay to remind us that beauty fades, food rots – like every living thing eventually does.
Plastic ruins the metaphor because it doesn’t die – and that’s the problem. A flower wilts and fruit decomposes. The disposable fork you used to eat your Woolies takeaway lunch will exist, purposelessly, long after anyone who used it is dust.
That makes Schaap’s work poignant, clever and unsettling. These objects are relics of a party we’ve been throwing for decades: faded, broken, deflated evidence of our appetite for convenience. Now the party is over, and nobody really seems to be cleaning up.
For this exhibition, the photographs are accompanied by some of the sculptures from which they were made, allowing us to see the transformation from discarded object to carefully composed artwork. The photographs turn trash into treasure, but the sculptures remain stubbornly rubbish.
Schaap has described beaches as being covered in “plastic confetti”, adding: “But there really is nothing to celebrate.”
After the Tide works because it doesn’t wag an ecological finger or smother you in a net of guilt. Schaap performs the considerably cleverer manoeuvre of drawing the eye and holding it there. Once she has our attention, she tells us what we’re looking at and all those lovely pastel flowers suddenly begin to look less like poetry – and more like evidence holding us to account.
• After the Tide, a solo exhibition by Thirza Schaap, is on at Berman Contemporary All Women Art at the V&A Waterfront until 28 November. For more information, click here.
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