Built from what was left behind.

This sculptural installation is constructed from ghost nets collected by the Pearl Protectors, a marine conservation organisation based in Sri Lanka whose work involves recovering abandoned fishing gear from the Indian Ocean. Ghost nets are nets that have been lost, discarded, or deliberately abandoned at sea. They continue to drift and fish silently for years, trapping and killing marine life without intent or limit. They are among the most persistent and destructive forms of ocean pollution.

The shark is the central figure of this work. It is a species that exists at the apex of the marine food chain and at the centre of one of the most brutal economies in ocean exploitation. Sharks are pursued commercially for their fins, their liver oil, and their cartilage, often finned alive and returned to the water to drown. Entire populations have collapsed within a single generation.

The ghost net is woven directly into the body of this sculpture, embedded between its structural panels and carrying within it fragments of coral accretions that accumulated during the net's time at sea. These are not added for effect. They are what the net collected as it drifted, the slow biological record of time spent entangling the very ecosystems it was destroying. The material that kills becomes the surface through which the animal is made visible again.

The work asks what it means to rebuild a creature from the instrument of its destruction, and whether that act of making constitutes mourning, testimony, or both.

Ghost net, coral accretions, paper pulp, found materials.