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I
had just begun to feel a little uncertain about the
spot where I was standing, so I moved back. The
grizzly bears had apparently decided to walk around
us, but they stayed very close — no more than 15 feet
away. The cubs were having trouble seeing us as they
strolled by, so they stood on their hind feet to improve
their view. My camera’s motor drive whirred away, and
one of the cubs began to climb up its mother. When it
suddenly emerged on her back, we all just melted.
It was June 2013, and I was documenting a unique
expedition called Gyre, a weeklong cruise covering some
450 miles of Alaska’s southwest peninsula. The expedition
was sponsored by the Alaska Sea Life Center and The
Anchorage Museum, and its purpose was to highlight the
huge problem of plastic in our ocean and to help influence
human behavior through art. Other organizations involved
with the expedition included The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), The Smithsonian
Institution, Ocean Conservancy and National Geographic.
Alaska Sea Life Center project visionary Howard
Ferren spent years planning the trip. “The ultimate
goal is to reach new audiences, influence attitudes
about consumption and waste and ultimately to change
behaviors that are fundamentally the cause of marine
debris,” Ferren said.
I was relishing the opportunity to explore this remote
territory — not only with my camera but also with an
incredible group of people. Gyre’s participants included
scientists, filmmakers, a teacher and artists, and all
shared the same mission: to highlight the striking
contrast between the rugged beauty of Alaska and the
thousands of tons of trash that are spit out of the North
Pacific Gyre onto Alaskan beaches each year.
From February through September, 2014, The
Anchorage Museum is featuring an exhibit called Gyre:
The Plastic Ocean, which presents works of art made
from garbage collected during the expedition. Artist Pam
Longobardi collected scores of fishing floats, which are
now part of her installation at the exhibit. Said Longobardi,
“Plastics are the cultural archaeology of our time. They
don’t belong in the ocean, and the tremendous, conscious
force of energy that is the ocean does everything it can to
expel this material and vomit it back onto the beach to
show us the wrong we have done.”
Most of our days were spent on isolated beaches that
can only be reached by floatplane or small boat. Some
were expansive and contained thousands of massive logs.
Others were tiny and contained no logs at all. We found
debris ranging from huge fishing nets to plastic bottles
from Japan. On one beach we found hundreds of college
football flyswatters destined for fans across the U.S.
22
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SPRING 2014
the
g
y
r
e
project
Creating art from a plastic ocean
KIP EVANS
