Tir/Môr
Senedd Welsh Parliament 2024
Land/Sea
Sponsored by the Senedd Climate Change, Environment, and Infrastructure Committee
Dates: 1 June – 31 August
Location: Senedd Oriel & Pierhead Futures Gallery
In Partnership with Ffotogallery and National Museum Wales
Senedd Welsh Parliament 2024
Mike Perry’s contemporary landscape photography opens our eyes to the conflict between human activities and the urgent need to tackle our environmental problems.
In these times of climate emergency and biodiversity loss, the artist’s work asks us to change our relationship with the natural world. Instead of melting icecaps and burning rainforests, the artist focuses our attention on the environmental crisis at home.
Land/Sea brings together two ongoing bodies of work that have been touring Wales and internationally for a number of years.
Senedd Welsh Parliament 2024
In the ‘Land’ works_ the artist focuses on places commonly called ‘areas of natural beauty’. Capturing settings like our national parks, Perry uses the artwork to explore man’s impact on these spaces. Môr Plastig (Welsh for ‘plastic sea’) is a body of work that classifies objects washed up by the sea into three groupings: bottles, shoes and grids. Perry uses a high-resolution camera to capture the intriguing surface detail found on each object.
The artist lives and works in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, Wales.
Artist Workbooks, senedd Oriel
Ash Dieback, Moonlight, Wales, 2019 and Veiled Thorn, Wales 2023, Pierhead
Veiled Thorn, Wales 2023, Pierhead
Container Abstracts, Wales 2015, Pierhead
Scaffolding, Wales 2023, Pierhead
Keep Box Fragment, Wales, 2013 Pierhead
Flip Flops 13, 29 and Shoe 22, Pierhead
Plastiglomerates Vitrine, Pierhead
Black Square, Wales, 2024, Pierhead
Burnt Fertilizer Bags (Red, White & Blue), Pembrokeshire National Park, Wales 2019
The artist found this lump of burnt plastic in a field near his home. the shape maybe resembles a ‘heart’ or a ‘continent’. The fertilizer bags suggest farmers are burning plastic rather than recycling and as a result toxic plastic becomes part of our soil and ecology. So for him it’s a symbol of the polluted earth. The red, white, and blue colours also remind the artist of Brexit and the resulting lowering of environmental and animal welfare standards. So the story it tells is not simply about plastics entering our food systems. It also symbolises the influence of politics and big business on how we farm.