Mermaids’ Tears charts Kurt Jackson’s campaigning work to address the blight of plastic in the ocean, and draws attention to the resin pellets or nurdles from plastic manufacturing (colloquially known as mermaids’ tears) that pollute the environment.

The Dovecot Commission, which this exhibition is centred around, interprets Mermaid’s Tears, a painting made by Jackson in 2016 for the pressure group Surfers Against Sewage. The plastic pieces embedded in the original painting have enabled Dovecot to experiment using plastic, debris and string fibres collected by Jackson and which point to the devastating effects of plastic pollution in our seas. Dovecot’s constructed textile specialist Louise Trotter has worked with Kurt Jackson to achieve a sensitive balance of colour and texture. The contrast between the fishing rope and wool (the traditional and sustainable fibre used in rug making) powerfully illustrates the incursion of plastics into the natural environment.

Alongside the Dovecot Commission, this timely exhibition includes a selection of paintings spanning the last 25 years in which Jackson has actively collaged the jetsam and flotsam of the sea into the picture surfaces, some of which will be exhibited publicly for the first time in the UK.

Julian Spalding, author of The Sea (2021) a major new monograph on Jackson launched to coincide with the exhibition, writes: ‘Kurt Jackson’s art is genuinely radical. It is an intrinsic part of his wider, awareness-changing agenda. Jackson’s art makes actual the brightness of seeing clearly, moments of heightened consciousness, vital both for science and for art.’
Jackson Foundation