Building on the success of previous No Time For Waste events, this new exhibition brings together local environmental artists, Ali Elly and  Jackie Sewell, whose work dives deep into the urgent issue of plastic pollution in the North Sea. Rather than simply drawing inspiration, the artists urge us to look closer at the everyday plastics that fill our lives. The plastics that shape every part of modern life.

The artists question our dependence on what is seen as essential yet so quickly discarded. Once their usefulness fades, these objects are discarded, but everything we discard continues to exist somewhere in the ecosystem, never truly vanishing. That somewhere is increasingly the ocean. Each day, an estimated 11 million kilograms of plastic, the equivalent of more than 2,000 garbage trucks, flow into the world’s seas, carried by wind, rivers and tide. These fragments of our consumption drift into the water’s vastness, mingling with the life they endanger and the beauty they obscure.

Spending time along the coastline and within the water itself, the artists have collected and documented found remnants, allowing new perspectives to emerge through close observation, inviting us to see the familiar anew.  

Out of this arises a sense of both wonder and warning, revealing a reminder that human-made remains, forever carried by the tides.

Through sketches, studies, paintings and traditional craft, the artists draw connections between the textures and patterns of discarded materials and their impacts on the natural world. Creating unique sculptures and artworks, they transform fragments of waste plastics into reflections on permanence, fragility and change, revealing the delicate dialogue between human impact and oceanic endurance.