Georgina Maxwell's pieces directly confront the issue of toxic waste and it's effect on sea creatures. One room holds a wall full of red printed postcards to which visitors can help themselves. Each carries a message about the undesirability of plastic waste in the sea. One wall of this room is taken up with a video projection of similar images...Maxwell's flyposting of a plastic industries conference is personal, it is not presented as a group campaign activity. [A site specific, art-activist event held at the British Plastics Federation HQ in Hackney, Londonon 30th June. The night before a Chemical Policy conference100 factual red texts were stretched in a line across the front building of the BPF HQ, like a gaping bloody wound]
In the other room, hundreds of used cigarette filters are clustered together in a square gallery frame, a bit like St. Ives minimalism, but more 'green'. Also somehow the presentation has slightly different effect to displays on similar themes you might see somewhere like the Eden Project. It looks far more like art than an informative display done by graphic designers and it also feels personal.
Maxwell presents an autonomous form of direct action to do with personal choices and self-empowerment through ethical choices. A set of shelves full of jam jars where items of plastic waste have been collected during a meditative walk [on Gwithian beach]. And do you know what this display reminds me of? A cabinet full of fish in formaldehyde done by Damien Hirst. I can't help it - the figure of Hirst looms over contemporary Britsh art like some sort of big horrible multi-national-cocaine-fuelled-Thatcherite-from-out-of-the-Omen.
On the other hand, Georgina Maxwell's cabinet pieces are more sort of like an anti-Hirst. Instead of pickling magestic sea critters and flogging them off to men-in-suits to store in corporate volts, Maxwell's tidying up some of the crap that's been killing the poor creatures off. Instead of presenting them in museum style vitrines, she's using old jam-jars.
Check out youtube link on this website for BPF art-activist video. | 
