When Ocean throws plastic back at you, make turtles

Earning great admiration from tourists, Delhi-based visual artist Manveer Singh has installed a giant plastic Olive Ridley sea turtle artwork of size about 15 feet at Puri beach to evoke a sense of responsibility towards the environment we breath in.

More and more waste plastic is ending up in our ocean with every passing day which endangers the life of aquatic life to a threatening scale for marine animals to mistake them for food. As per MacArthur’s report, there will be 850-950 million tonnes of ocean plastic by 2050, versus total fish stocks of 812-899 million tonnes.

Also famous by the name ‘Plasticwalla’, Manveer is the winner of the “METIS Initiative on Plastics and Indo-Pacific Ocean 2021”, a collaboration between Utsha Foundation and AFD and is making this artwork as a part of this initiative. He was the only artist whose project “From Plastic to Art” was selected out of 26 applicants from all across India for aforementioned initiative.

He chose Olive Ridley because Puri beach in Odisha is one of the favourable places for mass nesting though all species on this planet are affected by plastic, including Olive Ridley. They often eat plastic after mistaking it for Jellyfish so only a few of these turtles survive despite Mass nesting being really huge.

He used everyday-use plastic to create 250 turtles and then clubbed them to make 15 feet large artwork. Manveer has so far helped in upcycling/reusing more than 350 kg of plastics in India. He has used techniques of weaving colored plastics to create beautiful objects of different shapes and sizes to create art objects.

Interacting with the public to spread awareness on plastic pollution has influenced many local residents towards their role in making the environment a better place, besides he has also conducted workshops in various schools and colleges across the city.

Concepts like this certainly resonate with kids and adults alike to make these stunning animals transpire the message is so strong, that there is plastic pollution at a scale we can’t even fancy in our most wretched dream.

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