LUAP’s The Plastic Flood appears on digital billboards across the UK for Let’s Live With Less Plastic, curated by Tia Grazette for Plastic Free July. The Photography confronts the growing environmental cost of disposable plastic and waste.
The image shows The Pink Bear almost swallowed by a mountain of discarded bottles, containers and bags. The bright figure remains immediately recognisable, but the surrounding waste overwhelms the scene, turning something normally associated with playfulness and optimism into a much more uncomfortable image.
The Plastic Flood developed from LUAP’s growing concern with the impact of human activity on the landscapes encountered through his Photography. During travels in Thailand, he had seen beaches on Koh Phangan covered with plastic bottles, fishing nets, flip-flops and other waste. The contrast between places imagined as paradise and the rubbish accumulating within them became increasingly difficult to ignore.
That tension runs through the photograph. The Pink Bear has often been placed within remote or visually striking environments, but here the landscape is entirely man-made. Instead of disappearing into forest, mountains or water, the figure is surrounded by the material evidence of consumption.
The work also sits within a wider concern in LUAP’s practice around anxiety and hope. Environmental damage can feel overwhelming, but the work is not intended as an argument for resignation. For LUAP, change begins with recognising the problem and altering everyday habits, while responsibility also sits with larger companies and industries capable of creating change at scale.
In July 2020, The Plastic Flood reaches a much wider public through Let’s Live With Less Plastic, an outdoor exhibition marking the tenth anniversary of the Plastiki Expedition and Plastic Free July. Curated by creative director and environmental advocate Tia Grazette, who was part of the Plastiki project, the campaign places artworks on large digital billboards in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle.
The timing gives the project an additional urgency. While attention is understandably focused on the Covid-19 pandemic, disposable masks, gloves and other single-use plastics are adding another layer to an already substantial waste problem. Grazette describes the exhibition as a reminder not to allow concern about plastic pollution to disappear during the crisis.
Taking The Plastic Flood out of the gallery and onto billboards places the image directly back into the spaces where consumption, advertising and everyday choices already compete for attention. The scale of the campaign allows an environmental concern developed through LUAP’s Photography to become part of the visual landscape of the city.
