A stunning new exhibition at the National Maritime Museum shows how art can transform our understanding of the global impact of climate change.
The Pacific is at the ‘front line’ of global climate change, threatening the livelihoods and cultures of the island peoples. What will make us care about that? It seems that the facts are not enough, nor even campaigns and global protests. We need stories, art, music, dance – imagination – alongside science and technology, because they engage our emotions, they connect us to each other. The pioneering arts and climate change organisation, Cape Farewell, has been taking our top creatives, together with climate scientists, to some of the remotest and compromised places on Earth since 2003 – the novelist Ian McEwan, choreographer Dame Siobhan Davies, composer Jonathan Dove, for example, joined the first expedition to the Arctic. They experienced the cognitive dissonance of witnessing sublime beauty and imagining its imminent destruction, and together with educators and journalists, the artists brought their ecological news to the world. The profound artworks, music, writing and film that came from those physical, mental and emotional encounters were exhibited in 2006 at the Natural History Museum in London.
More than twenty years of high-profile expeditions, shows and projects later, Cape Farewell made a voyage around the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, which comprises twenty-nine coral atolls, and over a thousand smaller islands. The voyage was led by Cape Farewell Director and artist, David Buckland, Marshallese climate envoy and poet Kathy Jetnil Kijiner and USA photo artist Mike Light. Collectively they gathered the artists together with a team of scientists, Marshallese youth artists and cultural elders, a Bikinian boat builder and three film makers to be inspired and share cultural knowledge and practices. The team undertook a 450- nautical mile voyage encompassing Majuro Atoll, the atolls of Bikini and Rongelap, which were subject to American nuclear testing during the Cold War, the rural Wotho Atoll, and the more urban Ebeye Island on Kwajalein Atoll. Cape Farewell’s group of international artists engaged with local artists, cultural leaders and young people mainly from the capital city, Majuro, to creatively explore the Islanders’ experience and resilience in the face of both the legacy of the nuclear testing on the Islands in the 1940s and 1950s, and the existential threat of sea-level rise for these very low-lying islands.
The exhibition that emerged from this exploration is, in Marshallese, KÕMIJ MOURIJIN (translated as ‘our life is here’), comprising photographic, video and mixed media work. It was developed in partnership with the Pacific department of the Maritime Museum, in recognition of the role contemporary art can play to bring to life and make sense of what a museum might hold in its permanent collections: the Maritime Museum’s Pacific Encounters Gallery exhibits indigenous artefacts alongside objects belonging to the colonisers who divided and re-named the Pacific islands into Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia (the inhabitants of the area regard themselves as one people, Tangata Moana: people of the ocean). But how, exactly, does art lead us towards the urgency of confronting climate change in a way that facts or street protest cannot do?
As you enter the show, KÕMIJ MOURIJIN, one of the first things you encounter is, just below eye-level, a set of three Perspex boxes. Inside one is a model of what looks like a ruined bunker, white, against a white floor; in the next box, there appears to be nothing, just a flat wetness; in the third, the roof of a submerged building. The boxes are a little steamy and you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at – which seems a good metaphor for where we are with the shifting attitudes to, and realities of, our changing climate.
In the centre of the gallery is Alson Kelen’s Mythological Canoe, a delicate structure constructed in the wood from pandanus, mangosteen and breadfruit trees, with coconut husk and hibiscus bark. Kelen, former Mayor of Bikini Atoll and a traditional Marshallese wayfinder and sailor, commissioned women elders from the Islands to weave the canoe’s sail using pandanus leaves. The sculpture represents the historic canoe and the ‘stick chart’ skills that enabled Islanders to navigate the atolls in the archipelago, which, from sea level, can only be seen from a few miles away. The vertical and horizontal sticks create a structure, with cowrie shells indicating specific islands. The curved and diagonal sticks represent known swells and wave patterns. Looking at the sculpture, I imagine a full-size, functioning canoe navigating the coral reefs (these canoes are still used today): here, the smaller Mythological Canoe, with its miniature woven sail and large stick chart, is a deeply affecting symbolic form that honours and carries out into the world the Islanders’ ancient and precious cultural knowledge.
To the right is a work by British artist Tania Kovats, Admiralty Chart 761 – a kind of nest of pencil marks appearing over a map of the Pacific Ocean. Kovats has long been preoccupied with water and in 2014 exhibited a series of glass bottles containing water from each of the world’s oceans (All the Seas). The artist is Professor of Drawing at Dundee University, regarding drawing as a ‘mechanism of exploration’, and during the Marshallese voyage, she hung a pencil over the map, allowing it to make marks as the sea swelled and quieted, casting the boat high or low. This effort to record the movement of the sea by this simple mechanical means rather than draw something herself, was key to Kovats’ approach, perhaps to say, in these times, allow the wild to speak, notice the wild moving through us.
Next along is Adaptive Radiation by US artist Meghann Riepenhoff, which is a series of three cyanotypes, their intense, textured blues and silvers singing out into the gallery. The artist worked on the beach on Bikini Atoll with young people from the Islands, sea and sand making direct impressions on the light-sensitive papers. As the gallery text explains, these cyanotypes, because of the use of Prussian Blue pigment ‘may carry within them grains of radioactive sand, transforming the prints into memorials to the layered histories of this environment’ – referring to the nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll between 1946 and1958. The artist explains elsewhere that humans and animals have been treated with capsules of the pigment after contamination; that these works are tiny efforts of remediation, and one might add of hope: these collaborative works are so vibrant and alive, with one of the cyanotypes coincidentally resembling the crest of a coral reef.
A dramatic photographic and film triptych covers the gallery’s end wall. This is Witness by David Buckland, who walked with Alson Kelen in waist-high water to the vast concrete bunker, Castle Bravo, that was mostly destroyed by a nuclear bomb in 1954. The explosion completely obliterated three islands, which was filmed by cameras in the bunker. In Buckland’s piece, here on the left is the ruined bunker, almost too grotesque to look at; and on the right, a large portrait of Kelen with his mirrored sunshades capturing ongoing life in this sea-faring culture. In the centre, the artist’s projection of the words fear, atonement, and our life is here onto the water gives the words – which we mostly depend on to be stable and fixed – a physical instability that is both cognitively and emotionally unsettling.
Mark Klett is a geologist and artist from Arizona. In his photograph, Looking over Bikini Water, we see a traditional Marshallese canoe, tiny on turquoise water under a vast and threatening sky. The work illuminates the contrast between the human creativity and ingenuity of working with wild nature in order to survive, and the tragedy, scale and absurdity of human destruction.
Imagine an antidote to all that destruction and pollution: this is exactly what Hawaiian artist Solomon Enos, working right there on the beach, created in his series of three oil paintings, Machines that Extract Poison from the Earth. Enos’s surreal machines don’t look mechanical but like tall spiritual figures, afire with red and gold, imperceptibly lifting radiation and poison out of the sand and transforming them into clean air and electricity. Here again is hope dramatically embodied in imagination.
During the weapons testing period, the Marshallese people were forced to leave their homes. Climate change may force them to leave their homes again. Young Marshallese artist, Debby Schutz, whose roots are in Chuuk and Kiribati Atolls, works with Jo-Jikum, an environmentalist youth organisation, bringing their collective insights to a global audience. Here she exhibits a narrative painting, Jenij Le Ia (Where Will We Go), that addresses both the nuclear legacy and the uncertainty of the present through a complex arrangement of contemporary and mythical images. The photographic portrait image of another Marshallese artist, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, her lips blackened, her face smeared with white, greets us at the entrance to the gallery. Jetñil-Kijiner is a poet, performance artist and Climate Envoy whose work has a shamanic element, drawing on the Islands’ storytelling heritage, to teach the community about the environmental issues they face.
The nuclear explosion at Castle Bravo in 1954 caused an 8-mile-wide crater. Michael Pinksy’s film Mammoth shows the artist swimming to the centre of this crater in order to release fragments of a mammoth tooth found on the coast of Norfolk – thereby connecting both the Holocene and the Anthropocene, and two vulnerable coastal regions.
And then, on the way out of the gallery, you encounter once again, the Perspex boxes, also created by Michael Pinksy (Denial Architecture). You notice that the ruined bunker has disappeared, that there is now a complete architectural structure in the second box, and in the third, a house, is slowly descending into the mysterious white. This time you’re a bit clearer about what you’re looking at, and you simply wonder how you could have missed the obvious earlier on: a sculpture in real time that symbolises the inexorable time-march of rising sea levels on our overheating planet.
Note: the award-winning 70-minute film documenting the OUR LIFE IS HERE project will be screened at the National Maritime Museum on 24th January 2026.
Don’t miss this special screening of the award-winning documentary Our Life is Here, which follows the 2023 Cape Farewell expedition to the Marshall Islands through the eyes of Western and Marshallese artists screened at The National Maritime Museum. A brief Q&A with the film’s director, David Buckland, will follow the screening.
This event accompanies the exhibition Kõmij Mour Ijin/ Our Life is Here, which is on display until the 14th June. Several exhibiting artists will be present to discuss their work in the gallery space on 24th January.
For further information and to view the trailer, visit: ourlifeishere.org Please visit rmg.co.uk/olihfilm to book your free ticket.
Capefarewell.com Instagram: @capefarewell
About the Author: Kay Syrad has published four collections of poetry and two novels. She was Poetry Editor for Envoi from 2014-20 and writes about poetry and art for a range of publications.
