When longtime friends Lynnette Griffiths and Marion Gaemers stroll along the beaches of Far North Queensland, they see beauty in the least expected places.
For more than 30 years, the artists have scoured shores far and wide, turning discarded ghost nets and marine debris into spectacular works of art while educating others.
Lynnette Griffiths and Marion Gaemers with their finished costume made from ghost nets, worn by friend Val Schier.(Supplied: Lynnette Griffiths)
“We don’t just make beautiful things, we really want to create the message of sustainability and [highlight] the problem of nets and ropes in the ocean and what’s happening on our beaches,” Griffiths said.
Griffiths and Gaemers have built a reputation for their large-scale ghost net art installations but acclaim in the fashion world is new.
The pair, recognised for their science-fiction-inspired costume made entirely from ghost nets, were the only Australians to take out an international design award at the recent World of WearableArt (WOW) competition.
Lynnette and Marion were surprised by their international design award at the World of WearableArt competition.(Supplied: Lynnette Griffiths)
The birth of the babel fish
Gaemers says their art shows how marine debris can be repurposed into something beautiful.
“Our design was centred around the oceans on Mars, so we created a babel fish, a fictional fish invented by author Douglas Adams,” she said.
“It was a bit of a nod to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams and Doctor Who, because we are science fiction nerds.”
The designers imagined someone emerging from the oceans of Mars in this costume … with a cape full of fish.(Supplied: Lynnette Griffiths)
Created out of recycled ropes entwined with netting, the full-body, high-collar dress features trumpet shoulder pads, an intricately stitched bodice, long claw-like fingers and a cast net train which trails behind with over 1,000 small sardines woven in.
“The sardines are made from white rope and green net from the Indonesian nets, which is a huge marine debris problem,” Griffiths said.
“Each sardine took me about 22 minutes to make, so it was a huge amount of work, but the effect is worth it.”
The train on the back of the costume is made from a cast net and has around 1,000 sardines — made from rope — sewn on to it.(Supplied: Lynette Griffiths)
The striking sardines in the one-of-a-kind costume glisten in the day and shine at night due to the luminous quality of the fibres in the fishing ropes and ghost nets.
“A lot of the fishing industry use materials that fluoresce at night to attract squid and other marine life, so a lot of the rope we’ve used fluoresces,” Griffiths said.
“With this sculpture [dress] we’ve used the fluorescent parts in the fish, the corals and various parts of the bodice.”
Making a statement
WOW, founded in 1987 and often described as “Broadway meets Cirque du Soleil”, is one of the world’s largest annual design competitions.
Every design at the World of WearableArt is unique. These two efforts won awards in the Mars and Beyond category.(Supplied: World of WearableArt Ltd)
Chief executive Meg Williams said the judges were impressed with the pair’s ingenuity in using 100 per cent sustainable materials.
“They liked the way they used marine debris and reclaimed materials to make their garment and support the message behind ghost nets,” Ms Williams said.
It has been Griffiths’s longtime dream to enter the competition.
“We thought maybe we would win a sustainability award because our costume was made from ghost nets, but when we didn’t win that, we thought, ‘Well, that’s that’,” she said.
“When they called our name for the international design award for Australia and the Pacific, we couldn’t believe it.
“But to be honest, we felt like winners just being selected as a finalist.”
Lynnette and Marion with their trophy.(Supplied: Lynnette Griffiths)
Working together to be part of the solution
The women, who met on Thursday Island in 1994, have been involved in the ghost net art movement since 2009, working alongside Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists with a common goal of recycling and educating.
Gaemers’s background in fine arts and traditional basket making compliments Griffiths’s skills as a visual artist and ceramicist, who hails from an ancestral heritage of rope makers.
Lynnette and Marion were also behind eleven giant ghost net rays suspended from the ceiling at Sydney’s Exchange Square at Barangaroo South.(Supplied: Lend Lease)
Their passion to be part of the environmental solution led to co-founding the Ghost Net Collective in 2020 which creates art out of the marine debris.
Their Mermer Waiskeder installation in Sydney’s Exchange Square featuring 11 giant ghost net rays — each weighing 85 kilograms — is one of the largest handcrafted, sustainable public art commissions in Australia.
The ghost nets in their projects were collected from the Torres Strait Islands to Cairns and even the Sydney Fish Market.
Some of the ghost nets and debris collected on a clean-up at Chilli Beach, Far North Queensland.(Supplied: Lynnette Griffiths)
According to Greenpeace, about 640,000 tonnes of ghost gear (ghost nets, chunks of rope and other fishing gear) end up in the world’s oceans each year.
Heidi Tait, chief executive of Tangaroa Blue, a not-for-profit Australian organisation dedicated to the removal of marine debris, said ghost nets were a massive environmental problem.
“We’ve recorded over 5 tonnes of ghost net and rope removed from clean-ups along the Great Barrier Reef, as part of our ReefClean project since 2019,” she said.
Lynnette sorts through rubbish and marine debris on a beach clean-up.(Supplied: Lynnette Griffiths)
“Every beach clean-up we do, rubbish is separated, sorted and entered into the Australian Marine Debris Initiative database, to help us better understand where the marine debris is coming from.”
Griffiths and Gaemers hope their ghost net art will inspire others.
Members of the Ghost Net Collective and one of the giant rays they made out of ghost nets.(Supplied: Keiran James)
“If we can use our art to educate people, then hopefully we can make a difference,” Gaemers said.
Their Birth of the Babel Fish costume will remain in New Zealand for the next two years and be on show at next year’s event.
Griffiths says they are now looking toward next year’s entry.
“As one of the judges said, ‘Earth without art would just be Eh!'”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
