ELEGY

Highs and Lows Necklace was made as a mourning wreath for the Pacific Ocean, for its custodians on the periphery of ever-rising tides, and its full spectrum of life choking on plastic waste in warming waters. It’s a small gesture for a big problem.

As corals bleach to become skeletons, seabirds fill the bellies of chicks with the flotsam of our throwaway culture. Reefs and rookeries, once loud with life, grow quiet as graveyards. What we see is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

I want to look closer, I want to go microscopic.

Grief sits bloating in the back of my throat. This rainbow tangle of rope hails from East Beach on Henderson Island, one of the most remote places on earth.

Scientists have exposed a hard truth in this would be paradise: an uninhabited coral atoll of the Pitcairn Islands harbours the highest concentration of anthropogenic debris on record.

Collected by Dr Jennifer Lavers during her first Research Expedition to Henderson Island in 2015, then adorned with molluscs made of precious metals, this work emerges from our ongoing art-science collaboration.

Based on observations as a beachcomber, and studies of rafting as a means of species dispersal, the rope is populated with a colony of handcrafted repoussé molluscs made with silver, copper and gold. The wide distribution of mussels coupled with their role as ocean filters, feeding on detritus and plankton, makes them a key indicator for microplastic pollution globally.

Studies show microplastics affect their ability to adhere to substrates - to anchor themselves, as well as fertility. Their abundance and availability to predators mean widespread toxicity enters the food web at a fundamental level. The problem is almost invisible, and the implications are beyond comprehension.

It’s the jewellery scale and materiality of the shells that draws me in, and when seen en masse, a bed of mussels so exquisitely arranged somehow expresses this overwhelming sense of eco-anxiety for me. In the minutiae of the environment, we make findings of deep significance. Sometimes the little things speak loudest.

Traditionally cast out to sea in ritual bereavement, mourning wreaths acknowledge great loss through death. The romance associated with one’s soul drifting out toward the horizon strikes deep; that we might find salvation, a new beginning, an ever after. In reality, what we find at this edge of knowing is another shore, and our plastic finds it too.