Young people in Dumfries and Galloway have made their mark on a thought-provoking exhibition featuring striking images of the Solway Firth.
Into The Oceanic: Conversation With Our Ocean is the first exhibition to be staged at community-owned Dumfries High Street building The Standard following its landmark transformation.
Described as an environmental project engendering hope, it highlights how the ocean holds solutions to help tackle the climate emergency.
Part of that story has been brought to life locally through pictures and films of sections of the Solway Firth.
And the invaluable role that kelp has to play has been brought to life by pupils from Dalbeattie High School as they learned all about its properties, with images of them working – captured by Dumfries photographer Mike Bolam – on display in the exhibition.
The initiative has been brought to the region as part of a collaboration involving Kirkcubright-based EcoArt, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Creative Scotland and The Standard’s owners, Midsteeple Quarter.
Representatives of each of the organisations attended a special preview evening – meeting the people behind it, Fife-based artists and filmmakers Elizabeth Ogilvie, Robert Page and Katie Fowlie – on Friday. The exhibition opened on Saturday and runs until Thursday (April 3).
Fowlie worked with S1 and S2 pupils at Dalbeattie to highlight blue carbon and the importance of kelp which – together with plankton – comprise roughly half the organic matter on Earth, and produce about half of the planet’s oxygen.
She said: “Kelp’s amazing. The work we’ve done with the pupils has helped to highlight that by creating things with it – and showing how art and science work together.
“The school was brilliant and the children were a joy to work with. This is a really exciting project to be involved with.”
The importance of the ocean is demonstrated in the exhibition through mainly film footage plus digital prints captured by Ogilvie and Page, who have been working together for more than 20 years and collaborating for nearly 10 years on cutting-edge commissions, films and artworks which reiterate their shared environmental convictions, engaging audiences in a dialogue concerning environmental matters.
Ogilvie, an environmental artist, said: “Interdisciplinary research is crucial to address the urgent challenges of climate change.
“The level of required interdisciplinary research goes far beyond conventional cooperation between oceanographers and meteorologists, physicists, mathematicians, and climatologists.
“Artists and all creative thinkers need to be involved in this conversation, as it is through the ability to introduce new modes of thinking to each other’s established systems, and the subsequent communication of the innovations that develop from this cooperative disruption, that positive change can happen.”
As well as the benefits of kelp forests, the exhibition highlights how seagrass can store carbon at a rate up to 35 times greater than rainforests and salt marshes store carbon at a rate about 50 times more than terrestrial forests. These very important salt marsh ecosystems on the Solway coast feature in the main installation.
Collectively, these ocean-based carbon sequestering ecosystems are known as blue carbon.
Page, an artist-filmmaker whose work blurs the lines between documentary-making and fine art, explained: “This science has the potential for huge positive change in the world, but without the public having knowledge of its capacity, there is little motivation to act.
Ogilvie and Page work with marine scientists who know that art, by its very nature, can encourage this agency and inclusion and is invaluable at communicating often complex cultural and philosophical concepts.
Into The Oceanic was staged at The Standard as use of the space for all kinds of community activities is growing following the building’s recent completion.
Anyone interested in finding out more about using the space can contact Midsteeple Quarter enterprise manager Jakob Kaye by emailing [email protected]
