Kelly Deakin is a self-taught artist. Kelly has experience in photography and acrylic painting, but her heart belongs to pyrography which is a fancy way of saying burning. Burning on artist conks and a variety of re-sourced wood. Kelly has participated in art shows in London England, Manhattan New York, Sydney Fine Arts Show, 

Sydney Vancouver Island and several shows across Vancouver Island including ArtSplash! The Pacific Rim Arts Society’s largest annual show. 

Growing up Kelly spent a great deal of time creating things from repurposed materials so when the opportunity came to participate in the Salvaged Art Project Kelly jumped on the chance. With liter being a pet peeve and finding her pockets always full of some kind of debris it was an easy task to take on beach clean-up. For the past two years Kelly has joined the Pacific Rim Rotary Club and Hello Nature in beach cleanup at the Broken Group Islands. 

For this project Kelly and her son Rob did beach clean-up at Florencia Bay as well as a bit of salvage from the Ucluelet Plastic Depot. 

Not only are the marine animals subject to the downfalls of marine debris but the birds are as well. The subject for this piece is a Herring Gull. After watching a program on how the gulls end up using marine debris to help line their nests and seeing how the marine debris being ingested has created harm as well as death to seagulls, Kelly was inspired to represent their breed for this project. 

Herring Gulls are one of the most widespread species in Canada. Their breeding range includes every province and territory in Canada. Their nonbreeding range includes Pacific and Atlantic coasts, the southern United States and the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

There are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic waste estimated to be in our oceans, 269,000 tons float, 4 billion microfibers per km2 dwell below the surface. 70% of our debris sinks into the ocean’s ecosystem, 15% floats, 15% lands on our beaches.

Visit the installation at The Orange Door Gallery in Ucluelet, BC.