In the Baltic Sea, run-off from nitrate chemicals used in industrial farming has created the world’s biggest dead zone. From above, the poisonous algae blooms form patterns visible from space, and from below they choke off life in natural environments. The pieces displayed incorporate handmade paper from algae overgrowth, thus removing pollution from the bays of Tallinn. This creates images that represent a dying diver’s hallucinations or perhaps the present state of the sea.
The artist explains: “Changing our ways of creating, such as using paper made from nitrate pollution rather than from trees, is merely one of the thousands of steps forward that the society should take to adapt to our new reality. In case our great-great-grandchildren are able to peel up the layers of the Earth and look at the fossils of our generation, we should leave them the message that we wanted them to experience a planet better than one full of the problems we inherited.”
Sarah Epping (b 1990) is an American-born printmaker and painter who is currently living and working in Estonia. She studied at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wroclaw (MA and PhD). Her doctoral work “Narcosis” is greatly inspired by Estonian art and nature. In Sarah’s oeuvre, natural motifs meet geometric shapes and intriguing technical solutions. Her works can be found in private collections and museums, of which the most significant are the China Printmaking Museum in Guanlin and the Wrocław Contemporary Museum in Poland.
