Coastal Landscape

Making a Coastscape in Gapado, South Korea

Coinciding with his artist-in-residence exhibition at Gapado AiR, British artist Andy Hughes integrated a ‘Making a Coastscape’ workshop with invited guests from Jeju province in South Korea. Making a Coastscape is a visual method he co-created with partners whilst working on the project Coral Communities. The method enables facilitators to elicit resilience data from ocean communities.

To frame the workshop and introduce his own work, Hughes' explained his long-standing fascination with plastic pollution, the beach and arts activism. He also discussed a number of his projects: from the discovery of floating debris as a young surfer in the 90’s to his expedition in Alaska and more recently, exploratory work made whilst living on Gapado Island for six months. After the talk, the attendees (50 people) all left the building to gather materials from waste washed ashore on the remote volcanic island. On their return, they all placed various objects in the large aquarium sited in the main exhibition room. Below are selected images and a short video that illustrates the event. Click this link to read more about Gapado Island and to read more about Gapado Air.

Using found materials to represent what they saw and felt, participants placed waste materials in a large aquarium. All were encouraged to film and photograph, write and record share, discuss and respond to the exhibition, to the artist's talk and also to wider topics connected to the ocean and waste ecologies.

Gapado is tiny island 5.5 km south of Moseulpo Port in Daejeong-eup, located in the middle between Moseulpo Port and Marado Island. Beyond attracting day-trippers, overnight guests, and artists-in-residence, the Gapado project’s long-term goals include bringing back some of its population lost to the vortex of Seoul, after the decline of local agricultural and fishery industries

Above: Andy asked the workshop participants to think about writing a message to share online via Instagram, he explained that after returning back to the UK these little cards and messages would be shared on his website and via social media.

Below: A short video showing the attendees and the Gapado AiR talk and workshop event which took place on October 22, 2022.

Below: Temporary experimental 3-D renderings of the final coastscape.

More about Making a Coastscape

• The work was co-developed in Mauritius, Zanibar and in the UK with invited delegates and communities invited to be participants in the visual method.

• A paper has been published. Hattam, C. et al., (2020) Building resilience in practice to support coral communities in the Western Indian Ocean. Environmental Science & Policy 106: 182-190. Available online. A second is in press.

• The project has been presented and showcased through workshops at several events including a Global Challenges Research Fund Building Resilience event, 2018; the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, Cardiff, 2018, the Society and Sea International Conference, The Greenwich Maritime Centre, London, 2018 and recently with the Marine Social Science Network (MARSOCSCI) through a webinar titled ‘Co-producing an understanding of the needs and priorities of coastal communities’ .

• Importantly, the Commonwealth has showcased it as a project to spotlight best practice.