Reflection

Ever since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill devastated the waters off of our coast in Louisiana, I’ve become more and more aware and irked about the damage we as a race have contributed to our oceans. The ocean is one of, if not the most, important biome on the planet, providing most of the food and oxygen available. It is filled with vast diversity and uncharted mysteries, but instead of working to understand and protect it, it appears that we have decided to tarnish it. It’s easy enough for most people to do—the majority of people never see the ocean save for specific cleaned beaches catering to the vacationer. For this piece, I decided to scavenge the nearby shore for trash, collecting items as an accurate reference of what there is polluting the seas. I then superimposed the drawing of the garbage with a drawing of a fish, half-alive in clear water, half-dead from the trash and oil. I wanted to juxtapose the two, clean and graceful marine life with a dead and rotting corpse from the waste. The contrast is meant to be jarring, so that it can illustrate just how devastating human trash is to the ocean and all of the creatures that live there.