"When you disguise ugliness with beauty it enters the mind through another door."
Thirza Schaap
Wandering along the beach, Schaap finds plastic that has washed ashore and once in her atelier transforms it into beautiful sculptures. By photographing these sculptures, she tries to evoke an emotional response from the public by creating a contradiction. A clash between the initial aesthetic appeal and after a second look: repulsion and the realization of the tragedy that waste causes.
Thirza Schaap graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 1996. Since then she has been working as a photographer and is now exploring new art forms through her Plastic Ocean project. She has been living and working both in Amsterdam and in Cape Town, South Africa since 2013.