If, on a random evening, you ever spot a Dutch woman wandering the beaches of the Eastern Cape with enormous blue plastic bags, do not mistake her for a municipal employee doing overtime. She is probably collecting marine litter; plastic, bottles, cutlery, deodorant cans and whatever else the ocean has decided to return to us. For art.
Thirza Schaap, an internationally recognised Dutch artist and photographer living in Cape Town, has spent more than a decade collecting the detritus of modern life from coastlines and turning it into objects that are beautiful.
Her latest solo exhibition, After the Tide, at Berman Contemporary in Cape Town, transforms one of art history’s oldest genres, still life, into a tautological ‘still sculpture’. Yes, I made that up for effect: her work quite literally brings floating objects to a halt.
Schaap makes 'still sculptures' from trash she finds on beaches. She composes pictorial representations using found objects. From a distance, the photographs and sculptures of the objects look seductive. Colourful. Carefully balanced. And almost floral in their arrangements. Look closer. The flowers are plastic. The forms are bottles, packaging, pieces of fishing equipment and other fragments of stuff we use and discard.
Suddenly it all becomes ugly.
“I lure people with aesthetics and then they see the ugliness as they come closer to the work,” said Schaap over the phone last week. She was visiting her retired-florist mother in the Netherlands.
After the Tide presents the photographs and a selection of the sculptures from which they emerged. The sculptures are not merely props for the photographs, they are the work too.
Schaap’s relationship with photography began early. She was 12 when she first started taking photographs, eventually studying photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where she graduated in 1996.
Her art career began in commercial photography, travelling internationally for work. She eventually found herself spending time between Amsterdam and Cape Town, where she has lived and worked for about 14 years.
“I was working as a commercial photographer and I got sick and I had to cancel all my jobs. When I got well, I got bored. What you see today all started out of boredom. My husband and I would take walks on the beach and collect trash. I would take some pieces home.
“The art forms happened by accident. My husband was in the garage and I just threw some of the plastic ocean pieces on the floor. It was mostly bottles. Broken and intact. I then used these to shape out one big bottle, using these bottle pieces. Then I took a picture of it. It looked like a sculpture of a bottle.”
That was the beginning of the Plastic Ocean series, which has continued to evolve since 2013.
The material in After the Tide comes from the ocean, much of it collected during trips to South Africa's Eastern Cape province, where Schaap says the beaches can be more isolated than others.
“We always go to the Eastern Cape. There you find deserted beaches. And we have big blue bags to collect with. I particularly like visiting Haga Haga and other Wild Coast beaches.
“The plastic comes from everywhere. Rivers, ships, fishing activity and the countless other routes by which human rubbish finds its way into the sea.”
She has also previously exhibited work with Greenpeace at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town.
After the Tide is not Schaap’s first solo exhibition. She also had a solo in Switzerland nine years ago. But After the Tide marks a shift. For much of her career, she has primarily presented photographs. Now the sculptures have stepped out from behind the camera and taken on a physical form.
“When we were putting together the marketing content for the HEAT Winter Arts Festival this year, everyone in the team was drawn towards Thirza’s work at Berman Contemporary. Because of the colours and the compositions.
“She pulls us in with these and then when you come closer you see the ugliness of the composition. You would just look away if you saw all this ugliness elsewhere. Yet, we are all seduced by the beautiful compositions,” said Mary Corrigall, the founder and director of the HEAT Winter Arts Festival, during a preview walkabout of the exhibition that was on the festival's schedule.
Schaap’s work fit well into this year’s HEAT Festival theme, ‘Ctrl-Z (undo)’, which asked audiences not to simply look but to look again and question what they think they know and encounter art with renewed curiosity.
HEATis another article on its own. From 6 to 15 August, the festival featured music, theatre, dialogues and 16 art exhibitions across spaces including AVA, Everard Read, WORLDART, Christopher Moller and Eclectica, alongside a live programme that culminated in a sold-out performance by Internet Athi at Cape Town’s Central Methodist Church.
I was particularly taken by BABA YAYA’s Yazuke, which tells the story of Africa’s first Samurai through contemporary dance, as well as Qondiswa James and Melusi Mnqobi Molefe’s Gauteng (for Ebenhaezer), a poetic theatre work that, in its own way, arrived at a similar place as Schaap’s work. Beauty composed of ugliness, much like Johannesburg.
The festival's schedule also featured a special preview of Iziko South African National Gallery’s Materiality V2, which runs until June 2027. I am surprised that Schaap's work is not on show there. The closest to her work would be Gaelen Pinnock and Chris Soal's pieces. I loved both.
That said, this is not about HEAT, Schaap herself remains something of an unlikely fixture in the art world. She admits she is “not into social” life and does not spend much time going to galleries or openings. This makes her appearance at the official opening of After the Tide this Saturday, 29 August, somewhat noteworthy.
On the day, there will also be a special curated selection of VIVIERS garments, made from discarded materials, alongside Thirza's work.
The exhibition, at Berman Contemporary Cape Town, is on show until 28 November 2026.