Bowls In A FragileWorld

This was the exhibition Bob and I attended on Wednesday. It was challenging and thought provoking. Here are the words of the artist, Debra Shipley, which accompanied her work...

Please look closely at and into these bowls. I hope you will find them both beautiful and thought-provoking. Each is unique, and every one is polluted with a fragment of plastic, a fleck of laminate, or a chemical from the printing process.

My bowls have no practical purpose but they will, I hope, take on a motivational one. Our ability to care for ourselves, 

both individually and globally, is fundamental to both our own survival and that of our planet. In many cultures, worldwide and over millions of years, 

the bowl has been linked to daily food consumption - the very basis of human survival. That survival - the ability for everyone in the world to daily consume a bowl of food - is now being challenged on an unprecedented scale with the onset of climate change.

…I have used the basic form of the food bowl, a shape universally recognised, to symbolise human need. I have created my bowls using materials which are themselves part of the problem - the rubbish which we are daily putting into our refuse bins. I have also included dead leaves, petals and other organic matter, reminders of our natural environment and how vulnerable it is. Like our environment, my bowls are very fragile - without care they will disintegrate.

At first, when preparing the junk mail to make the paper pulp used to create the bowls, I carefully removed the plastic windows from the envelopes. I tried to select discarded paper which didn't seem to have any extra coating. So, I was truly shocked to find tiny bits of plastic imbedded in my final work. Look carefully and you will see dots of colour and typeface - evidence of inks and coatings. You will also see tiny flashes of reflection as the little plastic pieces catch the light. Initially, I tried to remove the bits of unwanted plastic,… but I quickly realised the removal itself was damaging. This became the underpinning narrative of my work. A metaphor for the pollution in our shared rivers, seas, earth and sky along with the realisation of the difficulty of its removal.

My hope is that when you look into my bowls you will take time to think about all this and to take whatever action you are able. During the forthcoming year, people will die in floods, fires and famine - all caused by climate change. Wth action we could prevent this.

Debra embedded nature- leaves, petals, seeds etc. into the bowls - and yet could not remove the plastic and chemicals that we have embedded into nature. These bowls were so lovely, so delicate, and so challenging. 

We all have a part to play, and we must collaborate ...