Spotlight on Robert Callender
Robert Callender was born in Kent (England) in 1932. After a period as a student of medical illustration he went on to Edinburgh College of Art, where he became an artist, and where he would later teach. An involved member of the Scottish art community, he also exhibited internationally. Callender died in July 2011, in Fife. His works were ahead of their time, highlighting key environmental issues. His seminal project Plastic Beach was created – in his own words – “for our children’s children’s children.”
Plastic Beach 2003–08 | Paper, card, mixed media | 4/500
Photographs by Bremner Design
“Robert Callender’s subjects are pieces of driftwood and various fragments, which come away from wrecked boats, and other material found on the high tide line. At first sight his sculptures look like found-objects, and might almost be interpreted as deriving from Marcel Duchamp’s provocative relocation of various functional artefacts into the world of art. In fact they are incredibly plausible-looking, three dimensional facsimiles made from paper pulp, cardboard, and paint, pigmented and given a texture using peat, saw-dust, and wood ash. Callender developed craft skills to such a degree that he produced near perfect copies, indistinguishable in the outer structure and surface from the originals.”
The area between foreshore and coastline is frame to both sea and land. That margin – the narrow slip between low and high tide – occupied almost the entirety of artist Robert Callender’s career. The zone where wash and shingle pools, a gathering point for the till of life, but also for life. The ways in which that zone changed during Callender’s lifetime have little to do with the eternal to and fro between tide and land so much as with the effect of man's disregard for the environment.
In his text The Beach’s Unbearable Lightness, Andrew Patrizio* quotes eco-philosopher Timothy Morton**, who says of liminal (coastal) spaces ‘…as a matter of urgency, we just cannot go on thinking of these spaces as “in between”. We must choose to include them on this side of human social practices, to factor them in to our political and ethical discussions.’ Patrizio writes ‘Callender brought such spaces to the forefront of his work … like many artists, he seemed attracted to marginal places and their troubling existence. In recent decades the environmental movement has highlighted, perhaps more than any other region, the edge, the borderland, in its attentiveness to change – such as low-lying, disappearing island communities or the zone where the melting polar ice-sheets meet and become the sea.’
Callender was born in Mottingham (Kent) in 1932. Readings from nearby Sheerness show that the sea level there was some 150mm lower† on his birth year compared to today. Almost forty years later, when Callender and his wife – artist Elizabeth Ogilvie – first visited the Stoer Peninsula (where they set up a re-purposed bothy studio) the Minch strait which met their shore was over 110mm lower than today; and when the couple moved to their studio in Sea Loft in 1990 the area of North Sea which meets the Firth of Forth lay around 60mm lower. Throughout this time of escalating sea rise – and thus, coastal topography change – another phenomenon rapidly began to alter Callender’s zone: the washing-up of ever more plastic waste.
Between 1995 and 1999 Callender worked on a series titled Coastal Collection. The series comprises 500 small sculptures of beachcombed objects. These creations simulate driftwood and wooden boat parts, they speak of the correlation between the appearance of objects and their essence.
We could perhaps romanticise the pieces that make Coastal Collection, we could name these acceptable examples of flotsam and jetsam – expected forms of nautical debris. But in 2003, Coastal Collection evolved into Plastic Beach. Gone were the muted colours of salt-water washed wood and flaked ship’s paint, now replaced by the gaudy primary colours of plastic waste. In his own words, Plastic Beach is ‘for our children’s children’s children.’ The project took four years to complete and is designed ‘to draw attention in a graphic way to the grave state of our coastline. The horrific assortment of plastic is quite alarming. Debris is both commercial and domestic but primarily commercial, reflecting the nature of our society.’*
Callender’s work, then, was ahead of its time – a clear visual representation of environmental damage – linked to the topic of global warming most clearly through the theme of excessive consumption and the dangerous over-use of petrochemical products. Furthermore, data released in August 2018‡ states that plastic waste on land – whether dumped or washed up on beaches – releases methane when exposed to sunlight.
And so – in the most extreme picture – the gathered plastic that inspired Plastic Beach references one tangential cause of what one day will be the disappearance of that same beach. Seas rise as gasses warm the planet. Callender’s works are portals to a world we’ll never re-capture. They are wholeheartedly site-specific, no matter the scale. Yet, the site needn’t be the beach at Stoer, nor the strip of sand below Sea Loft. Callender’s site, his zone, exists the world over.
Cracked Rudder 1989 | Paper, card, mixed media | 122 x 61 cm
Photograph by Bremner Design
* A2B: An Artist’s Journey, Lateral Lab 2015
** Ecology Without Nature, Harvard University 2007
† Figures obtained from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s public sea level trend charts 1900–2020
‡ Relating to the Public Library of Science’s research article 'Production of methane and ethylene from plastic in the environment' 2018. While it was known that plastic releases carbon dioxide as it degrades, this is the first research made measuring the emissions of other greenhouse gasses.
