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Underwater Museums by Jason deCaires Taylor
Jason deCaires Taylor is a sculptor, environmentalist and professional underwater photographer.
His permanent, site-specific sculptural works span the world’s oceans and seas and explore modern themes of conservation and environmental activism. Over the past 15 years, Taylor has been one of the first to consider the underwater realm as a public art space and has created numerous large-scale underwater “Museums” and “Sculpture Parks”.
Jason gained international notoriety in 2006 with the creation of the world’s first underwater sculpture park, situated off the west coast of Grenada in the West Indies. Molinere Bay Underwater Sculpture Park is now listed as one of the Top 25 Wonders of the World by National Geographic. His collective work is 1000+ life-size works, which are visited by thousands of visitors weekly.
Other major projects include MUSA (Mexico), Ocean Atlas (Bahamas),Museo Atlantico (Spain), The Rising Tide (UK), Nest (Indonesia), Nexus(Norway), Coralarium (Maldives), Ocean Siren (Australia) The Coral Greenhouse (Australia), and Cannes Underwater Museum (France)
His latest underwater forest is located in the waters of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
Named MUSAN, it is an underwater forest, the first of its kind in the world. Consisting of over 93 artworks some of which are in the form of trees, others which are figurative in nature.
The artworks, in particular those which represent trees, are designed to attract marine life on a large scale and as such will develop organically. These installations have been placed at various depths from the seafloor to its surface and are laid out to resemble a path through a dense underwater forest. Some of the tree forms will float just beneath the surface so that the whole structure provides a complex environment for marine life at all levels.
Marine life has been seriously depleted in the Mediterranean over the past 20 years and the work aims to highlight the need to rewild our oceans. Children are depicted playing in the forest, pointing their cameras at the human race, hoping for a future where the magic of nature will return.
