'Rising Tides: Art and Environment in Oceania' at the National Museum of Scotland

By Elle Borissow

Enveloping visitors with a tranquil, layered soundscape upon entry, the Rising Tides: Art and Environment in Oceania exhibition – now on at the National Museum of Scotland – is a must-see for the environmentally conscious and culturally inquisitive alike.

Gently crashing waves harmonised with tidal projections illuminate the greenish-blue hued space, a melodic thrum of smoothly synchronous paddling auditorily guiding you through the cabinets displaying indigenous artisanal practices, adapted to incorporate rescued ocean plastics – woven baskets, and plastic-straw headdresses – toward the vibrational Māori Tangaroa chant resonating from the final room where George Nuku’s installation artwork Bottled Ocean 2123 [Fig. 1] can be found.

[Figure 1] Entrance to George Nuku’s Bottled Ocean 2123 room, installed in the National Museum of Scotland, 2023. (Author’s Photograph)

Unified in urgent art activism against the pollutant (micro)plastics which plague the ocean’s body, and those of its creatures alike; the local resilience and adaptation of diverse Indigenous communities within the Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Pacific Islands region are embodied in the 350Pacific slogan, “We are not drowning, we are fighting.”

Produced for a campaign by 350Pacific, a youth-led climate activist network, Fenton Lutunatabua’s Raise a Paddle (2017) [Fig. 2] photography series sees Indigenous Pacific climate injustice Warriors “standing strong in the face of rising waters.” Their tone is urgent – the waters are rising here faster than anywhere else in the world, rapidly endangering many low-lying Pacific Islands. And yet, hopeful: celebrating the strength of indigenous communities in Oceania through powerfully charged energetic stances and traditional clothing. The symbol of the paddle calls to mind the human harnessing of the sea, but vitally, in a peaceful and harmonious way; not mechanised or pollutant, but moving sustainably with the currents and innate kinetic power of the ocean to elicit change and motion. The Paddle’s significance proves thematically pivotal in this exhibition as we consider the deep, and healthy, conscious relationship cultivated across thousands of years between Oceania’s many diverse indigenous groups their Pacific Ocean. Each work highlights the sea’s symbiotic role as provider of nourishment, and backdrop for socio-cultural traditions, endangered by urgent pollution and tidal augmentation caused by the neglect of others, elsewhere in the world.

[Figure 2] Fenton Lutunatabua, Raise a Paddle, photograph, 2017, in collaboration with 350Pacific. (Image courtesy of National Museum of Scotland website)

Artist George Nuku, of Māori, Scottish and German descent, lives and works between Rouen in France and Aotearoa (New Zealand). He describes the climate crisis as standing at the “edge of a precipice.” What lies beyond – in this futuristic oceanic abyss – is his Bottled Ocean 2123. A hundred years from now, the polar ice caps have melted; the planet is flooded, and plastic impregnates all life on earth.

Crinkling with a plasticity eerily akin to running water, the splayed oceanic forms of plants and creatures have been carved and bound by hand to visualise a plasticised immersive seascape, honouring the binding techniques of Nuku’s Māori Ancestors. Rustling beneath fans, suspended on translucent thread, a wall of tendrilous jellyfish-bottles [Fig. 3] waft and flutter – their effect capturing something startlingly naturalistic of Bluebottles themselves, which waft luminously in the deep. Yet, poignantly here, their colloquial namesake (the ‘bottle’ aspect) consumes them in a materially literal description of their translucent reflectivity and gelatinous forms under water. Enhanced by the undulating blue and green deep-sea lighting effects, the plastic becomes their iridescent form - just as the turtle and manta-ray (traditionally signifying ancestral guardian animals in the Māori cosmology) sprout from water-cooler bottles.

[Figure 3] Close-up of one of George Nuku’s Bottled Ocean 2123 creatures (jellyfish), installed in the National Museum of Scotland, 2023. (Author’s Photograph)

Floating centrally amidst the vibration, a Waka vessel (a Māori canoe) [Fig. 4] houses a small animal skull – perhaps in reflection of human extinction, or general loss of life amidst the pollution.  Backdropped by the rhythmic positive and negative relief of a tidal wall mural, the immersive experience is accompanied by a hypnotic loop of Tangaroa, which is a traditional spiritual chant to honour the divine ocean and its energetic life force. In essence, the Waka spiritually embarks upon a seemingly infinite journey of undulation amidst the cut bottles variously embedded in the water’s surface, conjuring the perpetual bobbing of rubbish in imagination of the year 2123; yet simultaneously surrounded above and below by sea creatures in a consuming and disorientating synthesis of indigenous life with this not-too-distant imaginative apocalyptic future.

[Figure 4] The Waka vessel traversing the plastic ocean from George Nuku’s Bottled Ocean 2123 room, installed in the National Museum of Scotland, 2023. (Author’s Photograph)

Nuku describes his process as “alchemy”, in making “treasure” from “trash” – his piece powerfully states the harm of our disposable cultural relationship with plastic as a material, and the danger of ignoring its deeply permeating presence, the degradation of which produces millions of harmful micro-plastics. In emerging from the exhibition, and walking toward the future, we should remember the paddles from the 350Pacific photographs, and their close link to the spiritual journey embodied by the Waka. Both their connection with the resilience of indigenous cultural tradition, but also with the artisanal practices of weaving, carving and binding – every bottle, Nuku has engraved and faceted by hand in connection with “infinity” and “imperfection.”

It is this type of care and consideration which is the remedy as we stand at the precipice: the solution encapsulated in a repurposed found-object art as shown throughout this exhibition, prioritising a revived mentality of resourceful adaptability. The social responsibility of a single-use ethos looms large beneath the surface, but a resounding message of hope and resilience seems the promise of positive climate action.