DRAWING

NU-PLANCKTON

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2016 - Ongoing

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This project came about from my experience as a scuba diving instructor. Ascending from dives through layers of floating detritus most of which was fragmented pieces of plastic, bags, wrappers, etc All this plastic in our oceans is slowly breaking down through the action of UV at the surface into smaller and smaller pieces, microplastics. It is not just large pieces such as bags that are being mistaken by the larger species of sealife for food. These new tiny elements are found in all creatures in the sea now, from the shallows to the deep. They are mistaken for a form of new plankton by the animals that feed of that and they are passed up the food chain by subsequent predators, to us.

The title Nu-Planckton was from the idea of how in some way the sea currents take these fragments and move and spin them around our oceans until they start to gather together en masse, forming giant country sized garbage patches. In what I considered a similar way to elements of quantum mechanics spin and twist and are yet  the basis of all things solid. The fact that Max Planck is the father of quantum mechanics and his famous equation E= hv contains the symbol Nu (v). This played into my love of titular wordplay perfectly.