THIRZA SCHAAP

Plastic Ocean combines sculpture with photography and examines our changing relationship with plastics and the increasing and overwhelming presence they have in our lives.

The images show a clash between worlds, offering minimal and aesthetically pleasing compositions which, on closer inspection, in-still a sense of ecolog-ical grief.

Plastic Ocean questions consumption, idolatry and what it is we value in our lives today. The effect is a quirky, playful and popart paradox.

At a first glance, the debris do not disgust us. On the contrary. Their dainty look almost seems to gloss over the ugliness of all the plastic pollution on our beach-es. But only for an instant. Our initial attraction, soon fades.

Plastic Ocean provides a kind of Vanitas for the 21st century. Traditional icons of mortality, ephemerality and wealth have been traded out for bottles, baskets and bowls: single-use items which are used and dis-carded, now only existing as empty vessels of de-struction.

Our beaches are covered in plastic confetti and there really is nothing to celebrate.

Thirza Schaap (*1971, NL) graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 1995. 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.

After first posting her Plastic Ocean images on Instagram she was published by I-D VICE magazine in the summer of 2017, followed by Lidewij Edelkoorts’s Trend Tablet, L’Officiel, Elle, Vogue, Aperture and many others. Her collection was included in the Finders Keepers exhibition at the Het Nieuwe Instituut, a design museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

In May 2019 during design week in Salone, Italy she was acknowledged by Instagram as one of four artists who present themselves successfully through social media. In March 2018 she gave a lecture, workshop to go along with her exhibition at Fabrica Research Center in Venice, Italy. Plastic Ocean’s first solo exhibition opened June 2018 in Amsterdam at Christie’s in collaboration with Colette Olof’s “O,Wonder!”.

Her first exhibition of her sculptures opened March 2019 in Maastricht in The Netherlands and later that year in Cape Town in collaboration with Greenpeace Africa.

Selection of magazines:

Het Financieele Dagblad, Saturday Telegraph, Elle, Figaro, Glamour, Vogue, Volkskrant Magazine, Gracia, Das Magazine, Wired, Times, Dazed China, Musée Magazine, 20er Magazine, Broadmagazine, Aestetica

2016-2021 (ongoing project)

Plastic Ocean project

Photographs, sculptures/assemblages and moving images

Art fairs

2021

• Art Rotterdam, Bildhalle, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

• Unseen, Bildhalle, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2020

• Art Rotterdam, WeLikeArt, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

• Turbine Art Fair, Johannesburg, South Africa

2019

• Art Rotterdam, WeLikeArt, Rotterdam The Netherlands