Mike Perry: Land/Sea

About

Preview: Thursday 6 April, 6–8pm Mike Perry will be in conversation with Ben Borthwick, PAC Artistic Director at 7pm. All welcome - please RSVP via the button below.

Land/Sea includes selected groups of work from Perry’s series Môr Plastig (Welsh for ‘plastic sea’), in which the artist collects and forensically photographs plastic objects such as bottles, shoes and packaging washed up on the beaches of West Wales. Displayed in taxonomical grids as if they are scientific specimens, Perry channels the beachcombing of so many coastal artists into the aesthetics of minimalism and conceptual art. Questioning the romanticism of how artists often represent the landscape, he invites us to consider the environmental impact of consumerism and the erosive power of nature. In his ongoing series Wet Deserts, Perry considers the negative impact of monocultural land use and over-intensive cultivation, and the process of ‘re-wilding’ by which nature reclaims its biodiversity.

Perry’s work engages with significant and pressing environmental issues, in particular the fragility of the planet’s ecosystems (be that land or marine), and the tension between human activity and interventions in the natural environment.

Mike Perry lives in West Wales where he is converting a coastal sheep farm into a site for sustainable architecture and art. His work is increasingly influenced by the surrounding landscape and environmental concerns. Land/Sea (Tir/Môr) is a Ffotogallery Touring Exhibition, curated by Ben Borthwick, Artistic Director at Plymouth Arts Centre and David Drake, Director at Ffotogallery.