Aberystwyth Trip : Mike Perry Exhibition

Today I went with @cryptocariad to the Aberystwyth University to see what exhibitions were there.

Mike Perry's exhibition was all about his work that looks at environmental issues, his Land/sea collection portrays the natural biodiversity of landscapes and marine environments that are being affected by human interventions like landscaping, littering and short-term profit endeavours.

There was a glass exhibition case showing some of his notebooks, this one in particular interested me as the picture of the sheep has a caption of "Serial killer". Underneath it he wrote that
"Sheep farming in the Welsh uplands has destroyed 1000s of square miles of farmland.
Sheep eat everything except.... Tarmac, gorse & barbed wire!!"
I liked that he thought about the affects even sheep have on the land, as it is a small detail and nowadays it is quite common to see sheep so we refer to it as natural. But, as my mum pointed out, it isn't. Forestry would be the natural thing but that's all been chopped down to make room for sheep and other livestock.
This part was from the Wet Deserts collection that looks at the health of upland landscapes that have been normalised to tourists as natural when in fact it isn't.

The above picture is one that I took (that I am quite proud of) that shows some of his work from the collection "Môr Plastig" which translates from Welsh into English as Plastic Sea. This collection is still ongoing and it looks at all the objects Perry finds along the beaches he visits in Wales. Perry's aim is to challenge the reader's view on littering and how it can be so aesthetically pleasing when individual pieces are photographed in a specific way.

The objects he finds are varied from bottles to sandals and shoes discarded on beaches.

A common theme throughout this work is the way he displays them in a minimalistic fashion which makes such polluting items so eye-catching to the onlookers.

A part of his Land/sea collection is his investigation into "Plastiglomerate" which is defined as a new type of composite rock that's a mixture of natural rock and discarded plastic (or any other litter), almost as if it is trying to mimic natural stones. This is said to have the potential to be like fossils, but rather than depicting marine life or dinosaurs (which I commonly relate fossils to), they will depict the time humans polluted the earth.

Above is my picture of one of Perry's Land/sea rocks, I found it so beautiful and the colouring caught my eye immediately as I walked into that section of the exhibition. I adjusted the lighting only a tad just to make the illusion that it had no frame.

Above is a picture of Mike Perry from a video in the exhibition, where he explained and talked about his work on Land/sea, showing how he used a camera that catches the tiniest of detail.

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