On 5 October, a 1.5 ton sculpture by artist Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press was delivered to the doorstep of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs building in Westminster, London. The work, titled Klang, is one of three giant black-granite Full Stop sculptures created to support Greenpeace’s campaign calling out the government’s failure to ensure the preservation of marine protected areas.
The works punctuate Greenpeace’s action to protect the Dogger Bank protected area in the North Sea, where they have been dropping boulders at regular intervals to stop destructive bottom trawling. This industrial fishing method, in which heavy nets are dragged across the sea floor to catch large quantity of fish, is highly destructive for marine ecosystems, as well as illegal in protected areas.
The remaining two Full Stop sculptures, Peanuts and Orator, will be shipped on board the Greenpeace Esperanza later today and launched at sea, completing a 50 square miles ‘boulder barrier’ installed by the NGO. Banner and Greenpeace said they will remove the artworks if the UK government makes a ‘credible commitment’ to ban industrial fishing from this and all of the UK’s marine protected areas.
