Trust the Whale (2023)
Cigarette butts, fishing nets, epoxy resin, metal.
The 5 meter sculpture is made of 30 000 cigarette butts and measures true in size to a baby humpback whale.
Whales are a big part of our global ecosystem: moving nutrients around the Earth. Their fecies are fertilizers for phythoplankton which in turn produce over half of oxygen around the planet. When a whale dives, it circulates the nutrients from the deepest part of the oceans back to surface where it is necessary for many organisms around.
Fishing nets and cigarette butts are listed as one of the main polluters of the oceans and waterways. Ghost nets a ka fishing nets left or lost by fishermen keep catching fish and other animals, including cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises) who get caught and die due to the entrapment.
Picture taken by Johannes Hõimoja.
Picture taken by Johannes Hõimoja.
This work represents the global connectedness of our ecosystem. We might not always realize that what we do or litter on land, can end up in the farthest of places on the planet, somewhere we don't even fathom to reach, affecting even the most gentle giant creatures out of our sight.
While the idea, design and most of the creation of the sculpture was my own, the whale wouldn't have formed without the technical help and work of my friend, Ivar Heinpalu, and loads of help from my friends and family. Big thanks are owned to the I Land Sound festival's family for initiating the creation of the whale as part of an environmental project backed by Philip Morris International.