Anomabo Bluebottle

Menace of Australian beaches known for stinging swimmers at least 30,000 times a year, bluebottle is an amazing natural formation composed of colonies of four types of mutually supportive creatures that, collectively, take a shape of blue semi-transparent gas-filled sealed vessels with long tentacles. Blown by the wind, hundreds of these zooids can reach the shallow waters, and wash up onto the beach. In Australia, their arrival results in unsightly beaches and painful stings to the swimmers. It is not surprising that Australians nicknamed bluebottles “the blue fleet,” and “the Terminator of the sea.”
Virginia Ryan, an Australian and international artist, art therapist and co-founder of the Foundation for Contemporary Art Ghana, dubbed the man-made bottles littering the Gold Coast of Ghana next to the historic port of Anomabo after the bluebottles of the Australian coast. To create this artwork, she painted plastic bottles collected from the Ghanaian shore in the color blue and affixed them onto canvas. This way, she not only made her metaphor of man-made environmental degradation more sensory but also turned pieces of trash into a symbol of identity.