minke

Stranded
Whale skeleton, alum crystals
6m
Ackroyd and Harvey

Ackroyd & Harvey retrieved a 6m long skeleton from a beached Minke whale and encrusted it with a chemical growth of alum crystals. Stranded was part of the Cape Farewell project, which was shown at the Natural History Museum and as part of the Liverpool Biennial.

'This artwork makes no easy concession to a quick sound bite about climate change. We were drawn to working with the skeleton of a whale after seeing beaches in the High Arctic littered with thousands of bones. Whales were hunted for centuries for their oil, for heating and lighting in the industrialising world prior to the discovery of petroleum. Some species of whales were eradicated completely and many are now endangered by changes in sea temperature and ocean currents, noise pollution and hunting.

Working closely with the Cetacean Stranding Programme at the Natural History Museum in London, we removed the skeleton from a minke whale washed up in Skegness, Lincolnshire, on the UK’s east coast. We cleaned the bones and then immersed them one by one in a highly saturated alum solution, encrusting the skeleton with a chemical growth of ice-like crystals.

As the work progressed so did our understanding of how the ocean absorbs vast quantities of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuel and how in the last two hundred years the chemistry of the ocean has changed for the first time in millions of years. The seawater is turning sour and many marine creatures are struggling to make shells. Ocean acidification is affecting corals, molluscs and tiny zooplankton, the major food source of many marine animals, including whales. It is now accepted that if we continue unabated in our consumption of fossil fuel, the acidity of the oceans will increase incrementally and the life they support will perish.'

(detail)