2016

Marina DeBris is an artist and environmental activist who uses her work and activities to help us be more aware of our impact on the coastal environment. She adopted the pseudonyms Marina (‘of the sea’) and DeBris (debris: the remains of something broken, thrown away or destroyed) to encapsulate her lifelong commitment to ecological issues.

Marine DeBris, also known as beach litter or tidewrack, is waste that’s been washed aground after people deliberately or accidentally released it in a sea, an ocean, a river or a lake. The huge amounts of debris that accumulate and float in the world’s bodies of water every day comprise items such as plastics, metals, rubber, paper, textiles, and derelict fishing gear and vessels. The best-known and worst example is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, in the central North Pacific Ocean. Ways in which the debris gets into the water include leaving the rubbish item on the beach or throwing it into the water from a boat or an offshore facility such as an oil rig.

 Marina was born in Detroit, Michigan and is a graduate of the Indiana University and the Rhode Island School of Design. She first lived and worked in New York, London and Sydney and settled in Bondi for nine years, after which she lived at California’s Venice Beach for two decades. During one of her daily jogs there, she realised that people have to do more than simply remove the tidal rubbish. She decided to volunteer with local ecological groups and to craft artworks from the garbage she’d found, using irony and humour to shock viewers by getting them to recognise the overwhelming damage caused by single-use, non-biodegradable plastic and other items that pollute the earth’s marine environments.

Marina returned to Sydney’s eastern suburbs after 20 years of dedicated activism in California. She’s still walking or jogging along the shore line, every day, collecting marine debris and using it to create garments she calls TRASHion, as well as ‘fish tanks’, and art installations, for exhibition at galleries in regional Australia and internationally.

Her works have been exhibited at venues as diverse as Washington’s Smithsonian Institution, as part of its Washed Ashore project, and Sydney’s National Maritime Museum. It’s also been featured in magazines and at science events and used as awards by organisations such as the United Nations. Her confronting creations have been part of a downturn art walk and an Earth Day spring clean-up of local creeks and popped up at retail venues, a ‘trashers’ ball’, the Burning Man event held in Nevada each year and an Environmental & Animal Justice event.

Marina’s Bondi connection includes holding ‘TRASHion’ walks on the beach, exhibiting at the Pavilion and, at the 2017 Sculpture by the Sea event, jointly winning the Allens People’s Choice Award for the installation she called ‘Inconvenience Store’. For that work, she also won the Waverley Council Mayor’s Prize and the Sydney Water Environmental Sculpture Subsidy, in recognition for her work on water pollution and consumption – and as if that’s not enough, she’s listed as one of the world’s 10 key eco-artists and 30 most influential contemporary women artists.

Courtesy Marina DeBris, and models and photographers Lisa Bevis, Jim Rolon, Dony Pantow, Stephen Wong and Jennifer Soo.