Kurt Jackson: Mermaids' Tears

KURT JACKSON

Mermaids’ Tears

KURT JACKSON for Caroline

KU R T J AC K S O N Editions

“ The plastic pollution crisis continues to

accelerate almost unabated, filling the

ocean, rivers, land and air with plastic

particulate, emitted from so many parts

of business and society. Just as we strive

to slash carbon emissions, so too must

the world truly unite to curb plastics

emissions from all industries. We need

a radical new approach, with policy

and legislation that forces big business

to give up on the linear economy and

throwaway culture in favour of a truly

sustainable model that puts an end to

plastic pollution once and for all.”

Hugo Tagholm, CEO, SAS

INTRODUCTION

In 2016 I made a body of work to exhibit with the charity and pressure group Surfers Against Sewage [SAS]. Originally addressing the concerns of surfers about the abuse of the sea with the dumping of sewage, SAS have moved on to address all issues involving the marine environment; indeed, the wider environment itself. The exhibition engaged with surfing but also the big issue of the day: the blight of plastics in the ocean.

I came across ‘mermaids tears’ or nurdles, the tiny beads of extruded plastic, the raw material for plastic processes that have found their way onto every beach.

A painting called Mermaids tears was made at that time and sold to raise funds for SAS. In early 2021 with the COP 26 in Glasgow on the horizon, it occurred to us that this painting could be used as the basis for a large textile to be made by Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh and then exhibited at the same time as the conference. I had previously worked with Dovecot in 2011 to create the rug, Grangemouth. This was also based on a small painting, this time of the oil refinery on the banks of the Forth made at the end of a project working source to sea of this epic Scottish river. This extraordinary place of light, smoke and immense scale represents the enormity and force of the petrochemical industry symbolically sat at the water’s edge, ironically on land reclaimed with landfill, now leaching and eroding into the estuary.

I remember a night may be 25 years ago here on the coast of West Cornwall when we were repeatedly disturbed in our

Mermaids’ tears. 2016 mixed media and collage on canvas 91.5 × 91.5 cm

sleep. Helicopters kept passing over the house, their noisy engines interrupting our dreams, we knew something was happening. In the morning the news was all about a ship that had run aground, been wrecked and broken up at the foot of the cliffs. For the next few weeks this was the local attraction, a place to visit to stand and stare and watch the sea attack the hulk that rapidly and surprisingly quickly disintegrated into its orange rusting plates of steel. But we soon forgot and moved on. However, if we bothered to look we found the results and the repercussion on the local beaches from the cargo. The ship had been carrying plastics from the recycled remains of cars – dashboards and bumpers and seats that had been broken down into tiny manageable pieces ready for transportation and then reuse. All very commendable but this flotsam was now out there and rapidly being spread far and wide, at the will of the sea and her currents and tides. Millions of tiny floatable multicoloured shards of polymer.

Mermaids tears seem to be pertinent to work as a metaphor for our entire treatment and attitude to the environment at large and indeed for climate change itself.

As coastal residents or holidaymakers, beachcombers or casual walkers we all come across the tragic evidence of the abuse of our marine environment, some is from the unusual event, the accidents and carelessness but much indeed most is from simply using the sea as a dumping ground, a waste tip, out of sight out of mind.

I paint the sea, her ways and guises, her manners and moods, as metaphor and topographical seascape, I see the pollution daily.

I also paint rivers, I make bodies of work, series of paintings and drawings following the routes of watercourses.

During these beautiful journeys across our country I notice the load of the river is gradually revealed as the river grows.

The further downstream I move, especially after a flood, when the spate abates the overhanging vegetation is hung with detritus that has fallen, been flung or blown into the waters to be carried away. Some of this catches on the banks but most heads for the sea.

A shoreline of mermaids tears. 2021. mixed media and collage on museum board 22 × 22 cm

It seems that once this plastic is released into our environment then it is out there permanently not just unsightly on our foreshores but more importantly as a dangerous active ingredient in the ecology of our planet. The plastic breaks down, becomes smaller with time, becomes hidden, not just in the depths of the ocean but becomes invisible to the eye. The plastic is consumed and ingested as microscopic particles, moving up the food chain to become a part of life, all our lives, a hazard to the very fabric of life, potentially threatening the fertility, viability and sustainability of ecological processes and life systems.

I make these paintings, actively collaging and including the jetsam and flotsam of the sea and river into my picture surfaces.

I am given beach clean pickup material and I collect my ownthe old fishing nets and ropes, those colourful nylon lines 6

tangled up in the rocks and rock pools. And those colourful jewels from along the strandline - the ‘screech’ as it was called in Cornish dialect, where the original use of these pollutants is long lost. Now seen as grains and shards of synthetic vivid colour, trickled along the tideline, a tidemark of the sediment from all our lives. I have heard that there is now no beach on our planet that is still pristine, everywhere is now contaminated by this detritus of the Anthropocene, our plastic age.

I applaud SAS, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Wildlife Trusts in their campaigning and their efforts to stem this flow of plastic into all our oceans and the wider environment.

We need a desperate change of mindset. kurt jackson 2021

Grangemouth. 2011. tufted rug edition of 7 185 × 215 cm

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DOVECOT STUDIOS

Dovecot Studios is a tapestry studio based in Edinburgh and founded over 100 years ago, yet we use techniques with a far older heritage. Through our tapestries, we interpret the work of contemporary artists and designers, using tapestry techniques that have changed very little since the 1400s.

Dovecot’s rug making technique, using a hand held tufting gun, is a more modern innovation and allows our rug-makers a great deal of creative freedom to experiment with the way the wool is cut and shaped in the finished work. The technique, where short tufts of wool are punched through a supporting canvas to form the image, is subtly different from traditional tapestry weaving as the image can grow organically on the canvas rather

than being built systematically from bottom to top. The resulting rugs are textile art pieces that provide a great richness of colour, as the wools are viewed ‘end on’, and when the yarns are bent over, looped and cut to contrast texture, colour and form, a sculptural, almost impasto effect is created.

Every textile art piece produced by Dovecot is an interpretive and creative collaboration between artist and rug-maker. In this case, constructed textile specialist Louise Trotter, has interpreted a new rug from Kurt Jackson’s Mermaids’ Tears (opposite). Dovecot

Mermaids tears. 2021. tufted rug 00 × 00 cm

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discovered how well Jackson’s expressive marks and use of colour translates into gun-tufted rugs, when we worked on an interpretation of Grangemouth at Night Smoke and Lights (page 7), a work that implies both the beauty and overwhelming environmental impact of lights from the Grangemouth Oil Refinery. Mermaids’ Tears presented a new possibility for experimentation with fibres when Trotter sewed in debris, string and plastic fibres collected

by Jackson from beaches near his home to reflect the collected plastic pieces embedded in the original painting. The contrast between plastic or acrylic fibres and wool (the more traditional 10

and sustainable fibre more often used in rug making) powerfully illustrates the incursion of plastics into the natural environment.

Our rugs are often produced in editions. Their hand-tufted quality mean that and each version of the edition becomes a new work in itself as the rug-makers creative interpretation speaks through the final work. kate grenyer 2021 Curator, Dovecot Studios 11

This soft sea, this hard plastic. 2021. oil and collage on linen 165 × 200 cm

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Wave of … 2021. mixed media and collage on linen 122 × 183 cm

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Beauty and the beast. 2021. oil and collage on linen 155 × 201 cm

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All that’s left. 1997/2003. mixed media on canvas 183 × 183 cm

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Catch a wave. 2016. mixed media and collage on canvas 122 × 196 cm

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Surf whites. 2016. collage and found materials 21 × 21 cm Roar. 2016. collage and found materials 30 × 19 cm

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Erme, dusk. 2013. mixed media and collage on driftwood 22 × 35 cm

Nanquidno lobster pot tangles. 2012. mixed media on canvas 82 × 82cm

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Small sea weaving. 2020. found materials 10 × 14 cm

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Jetsam. 2020. mixed media and collage on museum board 20 × 27 cm

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Pristine tideline. 2021. mixed media and collage on wood panel 60 × 60 cm

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Tied tideline. 2021. mixed media and collage on wood panel 60 × 60 cm

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The sea gives, the sea takes. 2015. mixed media and collage on board 60 × 60 cm

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Leave nothing but footsteps, take nothing but memories. 2006. mixed media and collage on canvas 152.5cm × 152.5 cm

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Bright and dark. 2021. mixed media and collage on wood panel 60 × 60 cm

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Woven, tied by the tide. 2021. mixed media and collage on wood panel 60 x 60 cm

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The lighthouse’s raging seas. 2007. driftwood construction 24 × 34 cm

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Tread lightly. 2006. mixed media and collage on canvas 152 × 152 cm

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KURT JACKSON

A dedicated environmentalist and true polymath, Jackson’s holistic approach to his subject seamlessly blends art and politics providing a springboard to create a hugely varied body of work unconstrained by format or scale.

Jackson’s artistic practice ranges from his trademark visceral plein-air sessions to studio work and embraces an extensive range of materials and techniques including mixed media, large canvases, print-making and sculpture.

The son of artists, Jackson was born in Blandford, Dorset in 1961.

While studying Zoology at Oxford University he spent most of his time painting and attending courses at Ruskin College of Art. On gaining his degree he travelled extensively and independently, painting wherever he went before putting down roots in Cornwall with his wife Caroline in 1984.

Jackson’s focus on the complexity, diversity and fragility of the natural world has led to artist-in-residencies on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, the Eden Project and for nearly 20 years Glaston­ bury Festival which has become a staple of his annual working calendar.

Over the past thirty years Jackson has had numerous art publications released to accompany his exhibitions. Five monographs 46

on Jackson have been published by Lund Humphries depicting his career so far; A New Genre of Landscape Painting (2010), Sketchbooks (2012), A Kurt Jackson Bestiary (2015) and Kurt Jackson’s Botanical Landscape (2019) Kurt Jackson’s Sea (2021). A Sansom & Company published book based on his touring exhibition Place was released in 2014.

Jackson regularly contributes to radio and television and presents environmentally informed art documentaries for the BBC and was the subject for an award winning BBC documentary, A Picture of Britain.

He has an Honorary Doctorate (DLitt) from Exeter University and is an Honorary Fellow of St Peter’s College, Oxford University.

He is an ambassador for Survival International and frequently works with Greenpeace, WaterAid, Oxfam and Cornwall Wildlife Trust. He is a patron of human rights charity Prisoners of Conscience.

He is represented by Messum’s in Cork Street, London and is an academician at the Royal West of England Academy.

Kurt Jackson and his wife Caroline live and work in the most westerly town in Britain, St Just-in-Penwith, where in 2015 they set up the Jackson Foundation. They have three grown children and seven young grandchildren.

S U R F E R S A G A I N S T S E WA G E Surfers Against Sewage is one of the UK’s leading ocean conservation and campaigning charities. It inspires, unites and empowers communities to take action to protect oceans, beaches, waves and wildlife.

Its mission is simple: to create ocean activists everywhere.

Its vision, ‘Thriving Ocean, Thriving People’, is about connect­ing all humans to the ocean and creating communities of people who want to make real change happen. The charity supports and empowers people to campaign together as the authentic voice of the ocean.

We are proud to be one of the world’s most impactful envirosurf NGOs, with a powerful national impact and global influence through our work.

• Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) enables and empowers the biggest network of beach & community cleaners in the UK, with approximately 100,000 volunteers participating in beach, river and community clean-ups annually. The Million Mile Beach Clean, launched this year, is its most ambitious community initiative, aiming to bring communities back together as the UK emerges from the pandemic and deliver a million miles of beach, street and countryside cleaning.

• SAS founded the Plastic Free Schools programme, active in 3,000 schools and reaching over million school children.

• SAS founded the award-winning Plastic Free Communities initiative, active in over 700 towns, villages and communities nationwide.

• SAS has been instrumental in delivering legislation to help fight plastic pollution, including campaigning for the plastic bag charge, the commitment to a Deposit Return Scheme, and the ban on straws, stirrers and cotton bud sticks.

• SAS founded the Plastic Free Awards, celebrating the heroes of the plastic pollution movement, which will happen on 17th June this year in Bristol.

• SAS provides the only real-time national water quality information for 375 beaches around the UK through the award-winning Safer Seas Service.

• SAS is campaigning to end sewage pollution by 2030 and clean up our rivers and coastline for people and nature.

• SAS celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2020, announcing HRH the Prince of Wales as its first Patron.

• SAS launched the Ocean & Climate Emergency campaign this year, campaigning to ensure that the ocean is central to discussions and solutions at the COP26 conference in Scotland in November.

• SAS runs the secretariat for the Ocean Conservation All Party Parliamentary Group where it works with cross-party MPs, NGOs and experts to seek solutions to ocean pollution and protection.

• This year is the start of the UN Ocean Decade and the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration against which SAS’s 10-year strategy is set.

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@surfersagainstsewage @sascampaigns @surfersagainstsewage www.sas.org.uk

JacksonFoundation North Row | St Just | tr17 7lb info@kurtjackson.com jacksonfoundationgallery.com

+44 (0) 1736 787638

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jacksonfoundation @jacksonfgallery @jacksonfgallery

front cover Mermaids’ tears. 2016. mixed media and collage on canvas 91.5 × 91.5 cm

First published in 2021 for the exhibition Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Published by Kurt Jackson Editions in 2021 www.kurtjackson.com isbn 978-0-0000000-0-0 Publication copyright Kurt and Caroline Jackson Ltd All images, words and poetry copyright Kurt Jackson 2021 Portrait photography copyright Caroline Jackson 2021 Art Photography by Fynn Tucker and PH Media Design by Lyn Davies www.lyndaviesdesign.com Printed by Park Lane Press, Corsham, on fsc® certified paper, using fully sustainable, vegetable oil-based inks, power from 100% renewable resources and waterless printing technology.

Print production systems registered to iso 14001, iso 9001 and over 97% of waste is recycled.

Mermaids’ tears, also known as resin pellets or nurdles, are used in the manufacturing of plastic products.These plastic pellets are a major source of pollution on UK beaches.

KU R T J AC K S O N Editions 2021

Jackson Foundation