Visionary British sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor will be opening yet another underwater art museum, this time in the Great Barrier Reef.
Taylor created the world’s first underwater museum in 2006 – the Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park in the Caribbean, which features contemporary ecological art sculptures. For the first time, however, Taylor is taking his underwater exhibition and art museum to the southern hemisphere and off the coast of Queensland, Australia to the Great Barrier Reef.
This installation of the Museum of Underwater Art: Great Barrier Reef, Australia, will open in December, and the first sculptures and exhibits have already been revealed.
One of the first sculptures is the solar-powered exhibit called ‘5m Ocean Siren’. Modelled on a real-life Aboriginal Australian girl holding a light out to the horizon, the 12-metre sculpture will be placed 30 metres from the shoreline and will change colour depending on the temperature of the seawater.
The second exhibit, the ‘Coral Greenhouse’ will be entirely underwater and function as a coral nursery and habitable marine zone.
Both of the first sculptures exhibited show clear but profoundly inventive approaches to signalling climate crisis (rising ocean temperatures and increase in ocean acidification affecting coral reefs), but the greenhouse also serves as a proactive, interactive art installation at the same time.
The underwater museum exhibitions will be spread along the Queensland coast, with installations at Townsville, Palm Island, Magnetic Island and the Great Barrier Reef off the Queensland Coast.
Taylor hopes that in shifting the frame to champion the ocean and the reefs, society can learn to value and preserve the habitat and the life it supports just as anyone would preserve art in a real museum.
His other underwater exhibitions include the Museo Atlántico in Spain, the Cancún Underwater Museum in Mexico, the Coralarium in the Maldives and the Grenada Underwater Sculpture Park.
Image: Jason deCaires Taylor via Museum of Underwater Art/Facebook
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Featured image: Museum of Underwater Art
