Thirza Schaap’s Plastic Ocean: A Curatorial Conversation

HEAT Festival director Mary Corrigall joins the gallery curator at Berman Contemporary All Women Gallery for a conversation about Dutch artist Thirza Schaap’s Plastic Ocean.

Created from plastic waste collected along shorelines, Schaap’s sculptural compositions are both seductive and unsettling. Their delicate colours and carefully arranged forms initially recall still lifes or abstract compositions, before revealing themselves as fragments of consumer debris and evidence of environmental damage.

The conversation will consider how Schaap uses beauty to draw viewers into a deeper confrontation with pollution, overconsumption and collective responsibility. It will also explore how Plastic Ocean connects with HEAT 2026’s theme, Ctrl + Z, by asking whether ecological harm can be undone and how art can interrupt habitual ways of seeing waste. Through close looking and discussion, the event invites audiences to pause, reconsider and imagine new forms of environmental repair.