By Kirsty Gilchrist
The exhibition ‘Beach Today’ is based on a daily photography project developed during lockdown walks along the Ayrshire coast from Barassie to Irvine. These photographs, taken over a 3-month period, acted as diary entries for artist Christina Riley, and were later published in a book by Guillemot Press in 2021.
Christina Riley is a Scottish artist and photographer based in Ayrshire, and the founder of the Nature Library, which is housed at 122B Montgomery Street on Irvine Harbourside within one of the Scottish Maritime Museum’s shipyard worker tenement flats. Christina’s work focuses on the coastal landscape and the traces left by both nature and human activity.
The stretch of beach depicted in Christina’s photography is the same area often surveyed by Irvine Clean Up Crew volunteers due to the large amounts of rubbish left there, especially during the summer months. Traces of human activity that are harmful to the environment are the counter point to Christina’s artistic displays and remind us of her style of environmental storytelling.
For example, records for a specific week last year show that almost 4,000 pieces of litter were picked up from North Ayrshire’s coastline. This data was released by the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) and is based on surveys carried out by volunteers who record every item found along 100-metre stretches of beach during that week in September.
On a positive note, the charity described these figures as the region’s best results in the past decade. This suggests that our awareness of the impact of littering is growing. Hopefully, this trend continues with the help of coastal cleaning volunteers and artistic projects like Christina’s that communicate the importance of this subject in creative ways.
This exhibition features a specially curated collection of books from the Nature Library that explore the themes of sea, sky and stone. On display are small guidebooks about geology and the seashore, collections of essays about nature and place, children’s books about fossils and animals, and Christina’s own book Looking Down at the Stars: Life Beneath the Waves. These books can be read by visitors when inside the exhibition space. The Linthouse resource library is also open for visitors to browse when manned by our volunteers, usually on Mondays and Thursdays. As this is the National Year of Reading in the UK, we hope this helps to inspire people to make reading a regular part of their lives.
We also encourage visitors to do some creative writing inspired by the exhibition objects and photographs, or the topic of the environment. These narratives of nature can be handed in for the museum to display in the exhibition as it grows over the summer.
The exhibition ‘Beach Today’ will be on show in the museum’s Linthouse building in Irvine from the 16th of May until the 2nd of August.
The museum is open 10am – 4pm daily and the exhibition is included in General Admission.
The Nature Library on Montgomery Street, Irvine Harbourside, is open by appointment. Email thenaturelib@gmail.com to arrange a visit.
Sources:
https://www.irvinetimes.com/news/25971557.3-800-pieces-litter-picked-north-ayrshire-beaches/
